The timing was comically perfect. The next day my latest Vogue Business piece, “How exclusive access became the new Birkin,” went live. The angle was inspired by all the Alo gym selfies I’ve been seeing on my feeds, as well as something I’ve been thinking about since I wrote, “The battle for the VIC”, which interviewed sales associates on all the elite experiences luxury brands curate for their $$$$ clients. Since then, I’ve noticed this obsession with exclusive access pop up time-and-time again. Whether through Selfridges opening 40 Duke, its ultra-exclusive members enclave for top-tier customers and tastemakers; or when I was in New York in June, being stunned by just how much the city’s private-club scene had exploded.

One thing that really came through in my reporting is just how much clothing, and products more broadly, are losing their power as status signals. , one of my favourite brand strategists who really kickstarted the new status-symbol conversation on social media in 2024 (and the multiple copycat scripts that followed), explained in the piece:

“The objects we consume - the things we see, own, photograph, or film - simply don’t carry the same cachet they once did, regardless of what the object is. Even if a product is physically scarce, it’s culturally ubiquitous. Even if almost nobody has seen a Birkin in real life, almost everyone has seen dozens of images of one.”

Instead, as , whose fabulous big brain is behind Trademarked, told me:

“It’s less about what you have or what you know, and more about who you know, and if your lifestyle accurately reflects that in a way that requires a much deeper form of entrenchment to even notice, penetrate, or belong to.”

Listen, many of us have been to enough scene-y parties to understand the importance of getting into the right room, and, once inside, being seen talking to the right people in the right corner of it. It’s interesting, though, how many brands across all strata of the industry (Levi’s, Nike and Sephora all have tiered access models) are betting on social capital now, and why the promise of being let into those rooms has become such catnip for the wider public.

Whether we like it or not, status-seeking is deeply baked into human nature and acts as a social navigation system. Who do we trust? Whose taste do we follow? Who do we want to be like? Who gets invited into the room? Who do we listen to when we don’t know something? The problem is that online, we’re suddenly navigating completely different maps, with signposts that no longer tell us what we think they do.

Pre-FYP, the people you saw online were largely the local cool kids, i.e people from school or whatever scene you inhabited, who you had actively chosen to follow. Now I can open TikTok and be served a 19-year-old in Los Angeles with 2.4 million followers who is famous for reviewing hotel bathrooms, followed immediately by a woman in Seoul with a completely different 2.4 million followers who wants people to watch her go camping with her cat. They’ve both earned money and followers from doing this (metrics that have historically acted as proxies for status) but do I really view either of them as having social standing over me? Maybe if I was in the market for new bathroom taps…Even in the circles that I can more legibly read who has status, social media is scrambling the signals. People can build huge followings through template slop or simply being very good (and working very hard) at feeding the algorithm, without necessarily having the social or cultural capital those numbers imply.

“The accumulation of followers is not a flex anymore. What really matters now is skill, craftsmanship, social capital… That is what the scarcity, opacity of communication, opacity of distribution, aesthetic innovation, identity - that is where the new flex is, where the cultural capital is.” Ana Andjelic

“Status requires asymmetry, oftentimes via a knowledge gap (information) or an acquisition gap (price),” continued Makoni in the piece on the strange surreal content landscape we now exist in. “When you think about status objects, both pillars are being democratized – social media accounts for accelerated dissemination of knowledge that usually would have been accessible by the few who are ‘meant to know’, and the acquisition gap has been democratized via buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) options, resellers, and I think even more esoterically, the Gen Z and Alpha ‘LARPing’ culture that’s emerging.”

Unless you are seriously deranged and/or very good at Photoshop, you cannot convincingly LARP that you were invited somewhere you weren’t. Unlike a product, which can be purchased, or a certain level of fashion and cultural literacy, which can be scraped from ChatGPT and regurgitated back to an audience, access is relational. It depends on who knows you, who wants you there, who invites you in and, ultimately, which spaces you are actually able to move through. If status depends on some kind of asymmetry, I can see why it’s become so appealing.

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Considering all the IRL discourse that’s also strangled us this past year, it unsurprising that brands are finding ways to gamify the desire to be in the room. But there’s a distinction I think is worth making between status as a marker of credibility and status as a flex. Followers signal attention, money signals purchasing power, access can signal social capital…. but none of them necessarily tell you whether someone is actually worth listening to. Really, though, the most meaningful form of access shouldn’t necessarily be determined by who has spent the most money (which is what largely gets you into the aforementioned examples), but by who makes the room more interesting once they’re in it.

I’m not anti-social media, but I am anti-the-idea that you have to grow a following by any means necessary, even if it means betraying the work that should exist outside of algorithmic pressure or skipping the vital learning that comes from actually navigating the industry you’re talking about. Rather than hacking your way to the top by gamifying an algorithm, I think the more interesting route is a slower slog that actually earns your place: putting in the 10,000 hours, meeting people, building relationships around shared interests and worldviews, rather than platform hacking each other - especially when that means being in rooms together IRL.

I don’t think everyone should now be desperately trying to get into the most exclusive room, or that we should resurrect draconian system of cultural gatekeeping – side note, there are so many literary nights happening in London that are open to everyone. I just think there’s something valuable about having genuine commitment to the things you’re talking about, knowing the people who also have a unique perspective on it, and having something to contribute when you get in the same rooms as them.

Or, to bring it full circle, the next status symbol isn’t access itself but having something to contribute once you get there.

Two years ago, I spent eight months on a book proposal that didn’t sell, in part, because I didn’t have a large enough following on social media. Since then, I’ve made a conscious effort to enter the attention economy, which has meant figuring out how to get my writing in front of as many people as possible.

As much as I want to fight it, that’s just the way things are now. It doesn’t matter if you’re a journalist, a musician, a filmmaker, a strategist, or a multinational brand, if you want your work to be seen by a large audience, you must first enter a gladiator arena. You have three seconds to avoid immediate execution, and if you survive that, sixty seconds to seal your fate. Your weapon: a piece of content; your opponent: every other person also fighting for attention; your judge: a viewer whose swipe functions like an emperor’s thumbs up or down, except they’re checking their notifications at the same time.

It is a brutally competitive environment, and like every brutally competitive environment, the science of how to win has been meticulously studied. Across TikTok and Instagram, an array of content strategists break down viral videos, pegging success to things such as: “Curiosity hook”, “series content so you follow and binge”, “movement keeps you engaged”, “unique fonts”, “personal story to build connection.” At no point is there a discussion of whether anything meaningful was said that was worthy of your attention, just that it was perfectly optimised to hold it.

Yet it is through such mechanisms that a teenager with a phone can command a larger audience than most publications I write for, or a reel titled “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Bananas” can be watched by more people than a TV programme with a $20 million budget. It’s also why authors are told to think about popular BookTok tropes, the chairman of Berklee College of Music’s Songwriting Department tells students to make “super catchy, really fast” algorithm cat-nip music, and why one of Hollywood’s most media-averse movie stars, Leonardo DiCaprio, is now doing TikTok trends to promote his films.

We are all trying to learn how to play the game, but the rules of the game are increasingly determining what gets made - and in our desire to win, we are losing sight of what makes something even worth paying attention to in the first place.

It’s taken me a long time to write this, and I feel a little guilty that as a result I haven’t uploaded anything in over a month. Every week that goes by I tell myself that I should just stick with a format that can be finished in a day or two. It’s why I used to post ins/outs lists and share everything I’d been reading that week, even though they’re not the best reflection of my voice or outlook of the world. Part of me wonders whether I should just accept the logic of the system. Why spend all this time writing something that only a fraction of people will actually leave one app, open another one, to read in full? If my goal ultimately is to make people think about the world around them more deeply, shouldn’t I just surrender and make a short-form video, or get ChatGPT to knock out a shareable infographic? Actually, why bother doing anything at all, when a video of a cartoon strawberry getting fucked by a cartoon banana is going to absolutely annihlate me on engagement anyway?

Attention, like any currency, is an exchange. What we invest our attention in today shapes the foundation of the thoughts and ideas we draw from tomorrow. Unlike money, though, it leaves no monthly statement - making it easy to spend without noticing. In the US alone, economist David S. Evans estimated the attention economy to be worth $7.1 trillion and 437 billion hours in 2016. Has the return we’ve received come anywhere close to this?

At its best, paying attention is a doorway into another person’s consciousness, allowing us to inhabit experiences beyond our own. It’s a form of capital investment, one whose dividends compound as you carry those insights forward. At its worst, paying attention is an extractive economy: a system that takes and takes and offers nothing in exchange but a blur of content designed to be forgotten as soon as it is consumed, so that way, you’ll always remain hungry for more.

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Why do some stories last forever while most content is forgotten instantaneously?

Almost ninety years before social media industrialised the attention economy, Walter Benjamin foretold the cultural conditions that would eventually make it possible. In his seminal 1936 essay The Storyteller he examined what happened when the advent of newspapers made more information available than ever before. For the first time in history, you could learn about wars, scandals, disasters, divorce, political upheavals one day, then theatre reviews, racing scores, gossip, murders the next, ad infinitum. You might not necessarily understand what any of it meant in the grand scheme of things or how it applies to your life, but you could be non-stop entertained by stimulating, glorious information.

Information’s value often comes from being new, which makes it inherently disposable because there is always something newer to know. For Benjamin, this constant turnover stood in direct opposition to storytelling, which operated on an entirely different timeline and served an entirely different purpose. He captures the distinction through two German words: Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Erlebnis refers to experiences as they unfold. Erfahrung, by contrast, is the understanding gained by actually sitting with those experiences and weaving them into your understanding of the world. Storytelling, according to Benjamin, comes from the latter. The storyteller’s role isn’t reporting on what happened, but to take the raw material of life and transform it into something that can offer others counsel - and no, that does not include advice on what creatine is the ultimate It girl supplement (also available through their ShopMy).

In 1986, if you added up everything the average person encountered across television, radio, and print, it amounted to roughly forty newspapers’'‘worth of information every day. By 2007, according to researcher Sune Lehmann, that figure had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers a day. That was before Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, so it’s not even possible to count the number now. Much of what fills such feeds is raw information designed to satisfy an algorithm that demands daily offerings. It’s why you’ll likely never read the book that will genuinely change your life, but you’ll watch a 90 second “five key takeaways” summary. Or why, instead of writing a lengthy text about how our online performances of status are changing and questioning why we seek status at all, I’ll reduce it to: “status through clothing is out” while “status through knowledge is in” (and will most likely do something similar again). No wonder we can’t remember 90% of the shit we see or post.

Benjamin argued that the fairy tale and the epic were among the oldest and most enduring forms of storytelling, preserving and transmitting human experience across generations. Case in point: the Odyssey is currently one of the biggest films in the world, even though it was written over three thousands years ago. I haven’t read Homer’s version, yet the myths of the Trojan Horse and Achilles; heel are seared into my mind, no matter how much slop I layer over them.

We might assume these stories survived because they cracked the ancient equivalent of a good hook. When we hear stories about gods walking the earth or heroes descending into the underworld our instinct is often to dismiss them as primitive attempts to explain a world we now understand scientifically - the entertainment of a pre-TikTok world, dreamt up by people with nothing more stimulating to occupy their time. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong argues we’ve completely misunderstood their purpose.

“A myth was an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time,” she writes, adding they were never meant to record events exactly as they happened, but to reveal what they meant. “Mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality.”

Mythology, according to Armstrong, was one of the first forms of psychology - it is worth noting that both Carl Jung and Freud studied myths while developing their respective theses - because it gave people frameworks (or, as Walter Benjamin would say, counsel) for understanding messy human emotions like fear, desire, loss and ambition. Rather than info-dumping scandalous details, mythology took universal human experiences and turned them into patterns we can recognise, with lessons we can apply to our own lives. They endure because they capture emotional truths that remain relevant long after we finish the story, and in the process, subconsciously become a part of the way we understand ourselves.

For instance, the most enduring mythic archetype, arguably, is the hero’s journey. From Odysseus and Heracles to Shrek and Elle Woods, the journey begins with a sense that something is missing in the hero’s life. They are then pushed beyond the boundaries of what they know into monster-filled labyrinths or Harvard Law School, where each challenge forces them to shed an old version of themselves, so they can emerge transformed and return with the new knowledge they set out to find. We keep telling this story because, sooner or later, life demands the same transformation from us.

That’s all well and good, I hear you cry, but myths cannot cure diseases, split the atom, land humans on the moon, or connect billions of people through glowing rectangles in their hands - for that, we need another mode of thought, what the ancient Greeks called logos. It’s the mode of thought that gave us mathematics, medicine, engineering, law, economics, and is rooted in the belief that the world can be understood and eventually controlled - provided you ask the right questions and test the answers rigorously enough. Throughout history the two have existed together as complementary ways of understanding the world. One helped us build ships that crossed oceans and machines that could bend the world to our will; the other reminded us that every act of mastery carries the temptation of hubris - and warnings of what can happen if we give into it.

That was until the sixteenth century, when the Enlightenment took hold and rational inquiry became the dominant way of making sense of reality. Thinkers of the period argued that humanity’s suffering was not an unavoidable feature of existence as myths suggest, but a problem that could be solved by the accumulation of knowledge through the application of reason. In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon went as far as to proclaim that scientific thinking would liberate humanity from ignorance and provide the means to remake the world. Religious myths and inherited traditions, once treated as sources of wisdom and moral guidance, were increasingly subjected to rigorous criticism; any belief that could not withstand empirical scrutiny was to be discarded.

Rationality has given humanity unprecedented power, but it hasn’t been able to answer the deeper question of what that power should be used for. It has allowed us to engineer feats once thought impossible, like the construction of the Titanic, which was once heralded as a triumph of human innovation - only for the “unsinkable” ship to sink on its maiden voyage. Didn’t they warn of such hubris in the story of Icarus… It has also allowed us to harness the energy contained within the atom, only for that same scientific breakthrough to culminate in the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wait, isn’t that just the age-old Promethean lesson that we keep inventing new things without the discernment to use them responsibly…

Today, technology can explain how attention works, but it cannot tell us what actually deserves our attention. The algorithm operates almost in reverse to myth by triggering our oldest instincts but offering little means to understand them. It turns curiosity into clickbait, anger into ragebait, desire into aspiration, and loneliness into engagement - all while training humans to turn their experiences into information-heavy content designed to be consumed once. We have built softwares capable of measuring every second of our attention, yet forgotten the older question that mythology spent thousands of years trying to answer: what kind of stories are worthy of our attention, and subsequently, worthy of shaping us?

Attention is the most valuable scarce resource because it determines what we become.

Currently the winner of the attention economy is Mr Beast. He has over 484 million subscribers, making him the biggest channel on the second biggest website in the world, where each of his videos regularly exceeds 100 million views. In a leaked internal memo titled How to Succeed in MrBeast Production, a 36-page document explaining his philosophy of content creation, he describes exactly how he achieved this dominance:

“I spent basically 5 years of my life locked in a room studying virality on Youtube. Some days me and some other nerds would spend 20 hours straight studying the most minor thing: like is there a correlation between better lighting at the start of the video and less viewer drop off (there is, have good lighting at the start of the video haha) or other tiny things like that. And the result of those probably 20,000 to 30,000 hours of studying is I’d say I have a good grasp on what makes Youtube videos do well.”

His decision-making process boils down to things like: “I Spent 50 Hours in My Front Yard” is a weak idea, because nobody would click on it. “I Spent 50 Hours in Ketchup” is better, because “an image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting.” In a film, the ketchup would be a stylistic choice derived from a director’s decade-honed point of view, or a symbol meant to represent something larger - like Warholian consumerism, say. Here its only purpose is to be strange enough that your thumb pauses for half a second before it keeps scrolling. It is a very lucrative purpose. His estimated annual earnings from YouTube alone are around $100 million. His net worth is estimated at $2.6 billion.

As much as we think we have abandoned mythical thinking, MrBeast occupies an almost mythological role in the attention economy. To millions, he represents the ultimate hero of the system because he entered the algorithmic wilderness and mastered its rules completely. Hence his cult following that treats him with a level of devotion befitting a modern-day messiah. Yet the hero myth was never about making idols to worship, but about activating the heroic potential within ourselves.

In the memo, MrBeast also states that YouTube is the future, and that “99% of movies or TV shows would flop on YouTube.” Ironically, some of the most interesting filmmakers of the next generation have succeeded by doing the opposite of what he recommends.

In 2019, an eerie image of an endless yellow office spawned an internet urban legend known as The Backrooms, becoming one of the web’s most infamous liminal spaces. These spaces range from deserted school corridors to anonymous hotel hallways - basically, any environments that feel uncannily familiar yet deeply unsettling, like they have “shedded their skin and they’re wearing a costume of the past,” says Kane Parsons, who recently transformed the internet-born myth into an eponymous box office smash.

At just fourteen-years-old he taught himself Blender to transform the lore into a 23-episode horror web series, which at no point, felt engineered for maximum retention, lingering instead on empty corridors and glitching with old VHS aesthetics. He is now the youngest feature-length director in A24 history at twenty years old, so far making $390 million on a $10 million production budget. In interviews, Parsons has never once spoken about how he maximised the IP’s commerciality, stressing instead his responsibility to the dedicated community who convene on Reddit to discuss every painstaking detail that makes the world feel so real, like which fluorescent light bulbs they think The Backrooms uses.

Although Parsons is not the subject of the film, I feel I understand more about what he’s genuinely into and his values by spending time inside in the world he created, than I do from many influencers who post six times a day. I’m not suggesting everyone should do exactly what he did. The lesson isn’t to make analogue horror on YouTube any more than the lesson of The Odyssey is to sail into the Mediterranean for ten years. It’s the conviction to venture into the unknown without any guarantee of what will happen next.

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography,” the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini once said. Today, we often equate autobiography with subject matter because if large language models can generate ideas and write scripts, and tools like Midjourney can generate images and videos, it can seem as though the only way left to make something personal is to talk about yourself. To me, the more interesting autobiographical element is the beliefs embedded in the process that made the work, and what the creator was willing to risk even though the odds felt totally stacked against them. Just how the pearl might not look like the oyster, but it could only have been created through a process unique to that oyster.

One of my favourite Substacks is Girl Insides, an anonymous blog that isn’t promoted anywhere except through its own page. Every instinct of the attention economy would tell you this is a terrible strategy, but I could genuinely see her ending up in the I Love LA writers’ room, or turning her brilliant entries into a book and/or TV series. Another favourite of mine is Biz Sherbert’s American Style. I’ve always respected that Biz has built something entirely on her own terms, outside the way mainstream media usually likes to talk about things, and earlier this year she partnered with American Vogue on a mammoth project that was unmistakably hers in both vision and execution. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

I am not proposing that we exit the attention economy - it would be naive to suggest that we can, but we should become far more discerning about what we pay attention to. The future storytellers of this economy shouldn’t just be those who figured out how make people stop scrolling, but those who create something that survives after the scrolling stops. Something people continue thinking about long after they put down their phones, because it influences how they see themselves and the world, not simply what they buy.

That is the myth the attention economy needs most - not the fantasy that anyone can go viral, but the conviction to make something in the way only you could make it, without letting the pursuit of optimisation become the purpose itself. Then, like every hero before, to venture into the unknown and see who you become in the process.

I dedicate so many hours of research and writing to these big coded pieces, that when it’s done I vow never to speak on it again. I have to move on with my life, and allow my brain to obsess over something else. It’s why when Vogue Business asked me to write about “How much nostalgia is too much nostalgia,” I initially felt hesitant. Yes, there are countless new examples (Justin’s headline Coachella set, Demna’s Tom Ford for Gucci dupe, the CBK of it all), but I thought I had already said everything I needed to say. I was also worried that revisiting the same arguments and presenting them as something new would make me a hypocrite, especially as that concern was essentially what I said was causing culture’s fixation towards nostalgia in the first place.

Then I remembered a question I had that I didn’t really solve at the time. Surely people cannot spend the rest of human civilisation emotionally indexing themselves against increasingly niche reference points from 2014 Tumblr because it was the last time they felt happy? Is there not a way for brands to connect with people’s values in the present, rather than simply reflecting the past back at them?

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Inspired by my interview with Tony Wang for my taste article, I’ve become fascinated by the idea that investors do a version of what I do - trying to anticipate the future - except they quite literally put their money where their mouth is. That doesn’t necessarily make them more correct, but it does make the stakes considerably higher. With that in mind, I spoke to angel investor Nasreen Alimohamed for the piece and, unsurprisingly, she is definitely not interested in brands purely built around mining their past heydays. The brands she believes in are the ones responding to how people live now and what they actually value today.

“It’s about seamless integration into everyday life - almost a systems-based approach where the product becomes naturally embedded into your routine,” says Alimohamed. This shift is visible in how consumers engage even with the most everyday categories, from food to wellness, where value is increasingly defined by small, repeatable moments of intentionality rather than singular acts of consumption. “You can see this shift everywhere, even in supermarkets - the way people think about cooking rituals, premium olive oils, all small moments of intentionality. There’s been this explosion of products built around ritual and lifestyle integration,” she adds.

Ah yes, the word I hear so frequently while trend reporting that it has almost lost all semantic meaning entirely: ritual. We are living through a state of permanent crisis where no one feels secure about what the future looks like, and ritual offers a sense of control. This is where I would usually be like, well duh? But the other day, while on an entirely separate reporting call where the concept of ritual came up yet again, I phrased it in a way that clicked a little bit more in my brain. I realised that rather than being led by impulse day to day, people increasingly want to be contained by habits they can control. Each day the world assaults me with something that I should pay attention to, and the only way not to be pulled down into a rabbit hole that doesn’t serve me, is to ground myself, and ask: okay what did I say I was going to do today? What did I do yesterday that set my day up right?

What brands have figured out, rather insidiously, that the new goal is to have those habits validated back to them as healthy and/or aspirational. Alo is the master at this. I always think expensive activewear is so smart: it’s not a £4,000 bag, but it operates on a similar margin for something that is, ultimately, plastic. What you’re really buying into is the signal that you go to the gym every day, that you can afford to pay a premium while looking good, and that you have the body to match that confirms you’re inside a gym ritual that compounds all of this. Caveat: it’s literally worked on me!! I have gotten into SUCH a good routine going to my local pilates studio, and I think it’s partly because I genuinely look forward to wearing my cute #gifted Alo set.

Sometimes reporting on trends feels like watching capitalism discover increasingly sophisticated ways to monetise emotional vulnerability. At least it’s better than when luxury was trying to hijack people’s insecurities and resell them back as aspirational identity through £££££ handbags. Or when it over-relies on their past glory days as a shortcut to familiarity in an environment overcrowded with content. Right? RIGHT?!

God, the bar is in hell.

I love the indomitable human spirit, and because I’m so bogged down in writing about behaviours and values through a brand lens, it can sometimes overshadow how endearing it is that what we’re really seeking today is a way to feel better through all this. There’s a reason longevity and wellness is so big, and it’s not about olive oil, pilates sets, supplements, or red light therapy, but people trying to reclaim a sense of agency in a world that increasingly feels outside their control.

I think my main takeaway from all this reporting, from going offline to scream clubs and the return to ancient healing systems, is that many of these behaviours become much simpler when you strip away the branding that is being attached to it all. If you’re not performing these routines for an audience, you’ll probably end up buying things for their utility rather than their symbolism. Sometimes those products are genuinely useful. Sometimes they’re mostly expensive symbolism. Usually they’re a bit of both.

Above all what struck me while reporting this story is that the shift away from nostalgia may finally be underway. Nostalgia asks us to look backwards for reassurance. Ritual asks us to look at what we can do today. One is fundamentally about memory; the other is about agency, and the latter is one that if we truly embrace where things can get interesting again.

As I wrote in nostalgia_coded, the great subcultures of the twentieth century emerged because people had the time, space and material freedom to experiment. If we’re constantly outsourcing our identities to brands, or endlessly indexing ourselves against old reference points, there’s little room left for anything genuinely new to emerge. So yes, wear the Alo set to pilates, touch grass after Bricking your phone, just don’t confuse the product for the feeling it’s trying to sell you. The goal was never the grounding ritual nor the comforting nostalgia, but the possibility that, through either one, you might reclaim enough attention and agency to imagine a different way of doing things, and in this fucked up world, that’s something we desperately need.

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When London College of Fashion asked me to speak to students about my career, it forced me to reflect on the seven years I’ve spent navigating this insanely turbulent time. I want to share what I can, wherever it might help, even though I’m not where I want to be yet. Because, my god, I’ve tried (and failed) at so many things in pursuit of what I want, and I’ve picked up some useful insight along the way

I started as an intern at The Face in 2019, and things weren’t this bad… but they were still pretty bad. I remember one of the senior editors saying my parents must be worried that I’m working at a fashion magazine. I wasn’t offended, I knew what they meant. During my second week The New York Times published a piece asking whether a magazine that had defined youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s could survive in the digital age. Traditional publishing models were already under pressure, advertising revenue was declining, and although I got to write plenty of stories I genuinely cared about, there were still monthly traffic targets influencing what got commissioned and how success was measured.

Compared to what happened next, those concerns seem almost quaint. Nobody knew a global pandemic was around the corner, shutting down shoots and live events. Nobody knew TikTok was about to become one of the most influential platforms in the world, in turn making us addicted to short form videos and reducing our appetite for nuanced stories. And in the years since, who would have thought that artificial intelligence would reach the point where it can generate images and text almost instantly, at scale, for free, with almost no regulation?

Before the pandemic, I thought redundancy was a code word for getting fired. During that period, I saw that you can work incredibly hard, do everything you’ve been told to do and more, produce incredible work, and - because of factors completely outside your control - lose your position overnight because the economy is fucked.

I was taking home roughly £1,900 a month (post tax) then and thought: I could also make that working in a café if all else fails. I’d rather do it now, when that kind of money is easier to come by, than later when I’ve got used to a higher wage. So I left full time salaried employment with no real plan A - let alone plan B - just a gut feeling that I had to figure out a different way of doing this.

That was in 2021, aka still deep in the pandemic. Some of those closest to me thought I was being reckless, but I just knew the traditional media career ladder was forever broken, and wasn’t willing to wait around for my turn to be pushed off it.

My goal wasn’t to beat the system or somehow outsmart broader economic and technological shifts, but to understand the reality of the environment I was working in and figure out how to actually build a career within it. That’s why I wanted for this lecture to look closely at the reality checks (print is dead, content is king and AI is god) that have reshaped the industry and rather than trace how we got here or propose industry-wide solutions, share some of the lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way. I also wanted to share how to develop a mindset that stops trying to predict the future and instead focuses on adapting to whatever happens next.

I spent weeks preparing this talk, and it’s based on nearly 15,000 words of notes. I did consider uploading it to Substack, but it was designed to be spoken aloud for 45 minutes, and it includes quite personal material that I don’t necessarily want sitting permanently on the internet, where everyone loves to take things out of context.

I would also love to perform it again in full. If you would too, let’s make it happen somehow.

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This lecture isn’t going to be about my journey, because what I did wouldn’t work anymore. The industry has changed too much. What I want to talk about is the skills you need to write meaningful stories, but also how to build a career out of it: how to get paid properly, how to pitch and position your work, and how to think strategically about every tool at your disposal. My goal is to help you achieve what you once dreamed of as a kid, but with the mindset of a battle-tested grown-up.

I’ve been doing this a while, and in that time I’ve tried lots of different things. I worked two years in-house at The Face, two years part-time at a daily newspaper, a year as Deputy Editor of The Basement magazine, and two years as Contributing Editor at Vogue Business. Along the way, I’ve pitched constantly, and had pieces published in GQ, Wired, i-D, Elle, The Independent, Vice and more. I’ve interviewed countless people, commissioned and edited others, and written hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of words. I’ve also written scripts for original YouTube series, worked at Dazed’s white-label studio, led social strategy for a major high-street brand, consulted for numerous luxury labels and pitched brands to sponsor panels and workshops. Outside of that, I’ve hosted a gallery pop-up at the ICA, launched a Substack, grown a readership and learnt how to share my work effectively on social media. Some of it I’ve loved. Some of it I’ve done out of necessity. Some of it I’ve sworn never to do again.

One thing about me is that I’ve always found ways to maximise the versatility and value of my skillset. I’ve spent years working on becoming a stronger communicator and a sharper distiller of culture, while also learning how to translate that expertise across different industries. I can proudly say I’ve built a viable career in journalism, even if some of the work I’ve done sits outside what that traditional job description might look like.

Ideally, paid subscribers would allow me to focus exclusively on stories that matter to me, but I’m not there yet. Nor do I want to rely solely on full-time media salaries or freelance rates, while supplementing it by selling free gifting on Vinted. I left working for a magazine full-time in 2021 on £28k a year, and the most I’ve ever been paid for an editorial article that takes weeks to report and file is £800. That was an anomaly - the average is £350. It feels shortsighted to narrow your focus when you have transferable skills that other sectors would pay well for, while also getting an insider’s view of the industry you’re reporting on. Everything I’ve done has deepened my perspective, which has in turn strengthened my writing. Look at : she’s worked as a creative strategist at Meta, consulted for Shopify, built social strategy for the direct-to-consumer cookware company Great Jones, written viral pieces for New York magazine, directed her own film, and now runs one of the most influential independent media operations out there.

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For a long time, I thought it was irresponsible to encourage people to enter the media world. I’ve seen the redundancies firsthand. Mourned magazines I love shutting down. Had endless conversations with friends about how constricted the industry feels. Watched as others pivot entirely from editorial to commercial. I couldn’t, in good conscience, tell someone they should try.

Now it feels more irresponsible not to.

We desperately need real people reporting on what matters. Telling people to give up on the impulse to write about the world and make sense of it - at a moment dominated by billionaire-owned media and AI generated drivel - is an invitation to accept whatever we’re fed as we scroll ourselves into oblivion. Fuck that. I want to share some of my own insights in the hope that they encourage the next generation of writers, and keep alive work that’s still worth reading in 10 years time.

Right now, the traditional route into journalism feels like a path only people with privilege and support can follow, and in many ways, that’s true. But by being honest about how I’ve made it work, I hope that more voices who feel the space is shrinking will be inclined to open it up anyway. And no, I don’t think the answer is just posting four short-form videos a day. You have to think strategically. You have to use every resource available to you. You have to avoid burning yourself out doing things that won’t pay off long term. Take non-linear paths. Don’t turn your nose up at opportunities because they don’t look how you imagined they would. Rachel Sennott started out as a Twitter comedian, and is currently developing the second season of her HBO show. Jordan Firstman broke out posting impressions on Instagram, and recently landed a $17 million A24 distribution deal following his Cannes Film Festival debut. If you know how to channel your talent through the tools available to you, anything is possible.

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I’ll be speaking for 50 minutes, followed by 40 minutes of Q&A. Hope to see some of you there.

Through my work at Vogue Business, I spend a big chunk of my week in long conversations with people who are absolute experts in their fields - individuals who have built their knowledge through years of actually Doing The Thing™, but don’t have time (or inclination) to turn it into content online. The amount of mind-expanding wisdom currently trapped inside my voice notes app is irresponsible. Please hold me accountable if I haven’t launched it by September.

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When I do, Tony Wang will be high on the guest list. He’s the founder of Office of Applied Strategy, a hybrid of consulting firm, think tank and venture fund. I first came across OAS via their second dossier about Horseshoe Maximalism, a term they coined to explain how “political polarisation today has given way to new cultural trends that embrace contradiction and extremities”. I won’t say any more - these physical-only annual research publications are deliberately limited to just 1,000 copies - but if you ask nicely here, then they might send you one. If not, better luck next time.

His insights formed the backbone of my latest piece about taste in the age of AI. I’ve complained about before, but it’s criminal that I only get 1500 words to cover something I’ve spent days researching and reporting. So in the meantime (while I sort out a few technicalities for the podcast) he kindly allowed me to share an extended cut of our conversation here.

Read on for thoughts about why taste isn’t a problem for tech to solve and whether venture capital is the sexiest form of finance.

To start broadly in a brand context, specifically fashion and beauty, what is taste and how do you apply it? It’s such a nebulous concept and hard to define. How do you take something so intangible and apply it to brand-building? And how do you think that’s changed over the last five years versus now, in the age of AI?

I won’t wax too poetic on the metaphysics of taste - that’s such a huge debate. And I think when tech bros talk about taste, they mean it in a much narrower aperture compared to how it’s discussed more broadly. But in the scope of what we’re discussing, the easiest definition I’ve heard - and one I agree with - is that taste is conviction.

I don’t know if “democratises” is the right word, but AI has rendered a lot of knowledge economy-based industries potentially replaceable, or at least made the cost of accessing that knowledge close to zero. Because now AI can index and pull from almost all publicly available data and present that information to you. So, in terms of taste, there’s a layer that is the knowledge base and the references, but that aspect of taste is being compressed toward zero.

A key aspect of taste is not simply knowing all the designers or all the options. It’s the curation and deployment of that knowledge, whether that’s in styling yourself, making a decision, or expressing your own taste level. It’s also a conviction in certain approaches and certain ideas. That is what leads to the expression of taste, and that conviction layer is interesting because that’s the thing AI is unable to do. AI can tell you all of these things, but it still cannot make the decision. And when it does make decisions, it is essentially a regression to the mean. AI, as we’ve built it today, is entirely probabilistic.

There was a counterpoint made by Nan Yu from Linear who tweeted: “I hate to break this to everyone, but you probably don’t have better taste than the AI.” He argues that people are delusional for thinking AI can’t replace “taste”, and that we’re projecting our insecurities onto AI (though his specific example of taste is in relation to product decisions). I think he’s pointing to this idea of the emulation of taste, which I agree with. But a lot of taste is about practice and experimentation - that’s how you develop conviction. The reason someone is stylish is because they take the time to experiment and learn. That also brings in the class dimension, because access to taste often requires a certain level of material access in order to have that exposure. That’s why a lot of art collectors come from wealthy families - they grew up in environments where they had the time and exposure to appreciate art, let it gestate and develop a point of view.

But ultimately, that conviction layer is what AI can’t replace, because AI simply can’t have conviction. It can tell you probabilistically whether something is a good idea or not, but it can’t give you the conviction or confidence to say, “this is the thing I’m going to do.” And I think that’s the aspect of conviction that a lot of tech people are latching onto, because taste - at its core - is a function of human discernment and judgment applied in a way that creates distinction and differentiation.

Taste is also about difference, which is why it’s linked to luxury. It’s about exclusivity - it’s a different way of thinking. I joke, I think Anthropic is tasteful, and I think OpenAI is not tasteful. The reason I say that is that OpenAI might have values, they have a creative direction, and they have a brand - it’s consistent. But the reason I don’t think it’s tasteful is because everything it does feels like the most optimised, calculated business decision to maximise value. Everything is driven by optimisation. So there’s no real expression of conviction about what it believes in. Simply following market dynamics is not an expression of taste, because that is just doing what the market would do.

Whereas Anthropic feels like it makes decisions that resist market dynamics. That’s another way I frame it to tech and VC audiences: taste is, in a brand sense, the ability to resist market dynamics. When companies do things that resist the profit incentive - even if they may generate money in the long run - that’s a tasteful brand. For example, A24 is very director-friendly, very invested in storytelling and brand building. In the short term, it might not look optimised for revenue or commercial gain, but in the long term it creates value differently from a generic commercial entity.

What I’m seeing a lot of - whether it’s through generative AI chatbots or vibe coding - is people who historically wouldn’t have had the money or skills to do something are now able to. At the same time, the people who used to build brands and clothing companies were often driven by something beyond money. If it was purely financial, they would have done something easier.

But with AI, a lot of what I’m hearing is this idea that if you don’t jump in now, you’re going to end up in a permanent AI underclass, and that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make money. There’s a lot of that thinking emerging because, historically, it just wouldn’t have been possible for one person to build certain things without serious investment. Now there is an ability to saturate the space in a very different way.

All of that to say, I think we’re at a precipice where there will be an interesting taste gap, because there will still be people who build things with conviction and values, but at the same time, there will people responding to a perceived opportunity and momentum of a “gold rush”.

If we bring this back to fashion, I think that when we look at the recent creative lull in luxury fashion, a lot people were saying saying, “I just feel like you’re trying to make money off us, and we’re not idiots. We can see through it.” And now we’re seeing a focus towards creativity again. With that in mind, when you work with brands, especially thinking about conviction and value judgment, how are you giving them parameters to discover that?

There are three things I think are worth bringing into this. The first is that a huge part of the OAS philosophy is that we say internally and to clients that OAS is a constant investigation of what value really means. A big part of that comes from a personal question around value, and a desire to move beyond traditional capitalist constructions of value as pure scale or incrementality. So a large part of our work is finding new pockets of value. We help companies uncover and tap into new sources of value. A lot of what we do is help companies reframe the question of what they actually care about - what value is, and how to move beyond traditional KPIs and conventional ways of thinking about growth, in order to build new systems of value creation.

Second, this connects to a broader trend where everyone wants to be a cultural protagonist. This blew up around 2020, when every company suddenly wanted to be an entertainment brand and be relevant in culture - even if, for example, a defence tech company like Palantir. They want to be relevant culturally, so they engage in cultural marketing. And that shift was actually very helpful for OAS, because it put brands in a position where they realised that in order to grow and generate value, they needed to show up in culture in a meaningful way. That already forced a different kind of thinking, because it’s a very different approach to marketing and brand-building, so we were in a position where we could help brands rethink what value actually means.

Finally, I’ll link it to the third point, which relates to what you said about AI allowing us to do anything. The real question becomes: what do we want to do? And I think that’s really important, because we talk about this on a personal level too - how AI allows everyone, including college students and potential entrepreneurs, to essentially have the world at their fingertips - you can build any app you want, everything is possible. So now it’s up to you to decide what you want to do, and that comes back to conviction.

The same question you pointed to at an individual level - what do we want to do with our time? - also applies to brands. Philosophically, that connects to existentialism - think Kierkegaard or Sartre - the idea that you can do anything, your life can mean anything, but that freedom is also terrifying. It’s the same with AI. To a degree, it allows us to do almost anything, and increasingly it will remove technical and time constraints by doing a lot of work on our behalf. But brands are also now dealing with that same fundamental question.

Another major paradigm shift that people don’t talk about enough is that AI has also been a reckoning for brand media, because now anyone can copy your paid media playbook. Anyone can copy the way you show up in the world through brand, marketing, and all the touch points that are effectively a layer of taste. If AI can do all of that better than you, then the question becomes: why do you actually exist? Brands are realising they need to develop a stronger sense of differentiation. It used to be easier to stand out pre-AI, but now there are much stronger competitive forces both internally and externally.

That’s kind of why so many tech people and VC people are latching on to taste, because it’s also, I think, a self-indictment of themselves. VC is ostensibly about deploying capital as a function of knowing the future. That’s what makes it, to me, the sexiest form of finance. Compared to private equity or other forms - distressed assets, hedge funds, commodities trading - those are based on existing businesses or known histories. You’re taking something with a track record, maybe fixing it, and selling it again.

Venture capital, on the other hand, is future-facing and highly asymmetric. It’s about investing in something unproven that doesn’t exist yet, and deciding whether it will make money in the future without precedent. That’s why every VC fund presents itself as thought leaders, focused on foresight and forecasting, even though a lot of their forecasting is not particularly salient. But they have to position themselves as oracles or seers in the financial world, because they are deploying capital based on that future orientation.

At the same time, if you’ve ever worked with or spoken to people in VC, the industry is gripped by constant FOMO and comparison. It’s very much a case of, “If this fund is investing, we need to invest as well.” For a group of people who talk a lot about taste as conviction, I’ve rarely encountered an industry with so many people who actually lack a strong sense of conviction. If you speak to founders, a very common experience is that when they meet VCs, no one is immediately ready to write a check. Everyone says, “We’re interested, let’s stay in touch,” but they want to maintain optionality and wait for someone else to move first. A typical scenario is that fundraising takes three to five months. For the first two and a half months, VCs say things like, “We love your idea, let’s stay in touch,” but no one commits. Then once one person writes the first check, everyone suddenly follows, and the round closes in one or two weeks.

It’s also a broader self-indictment and realisation that AI reveals the gap between what VC promises - being arbiters of taste and knowing where the future is going - and the fact that the industry often operates in a way where there is very little exercising of conviction, and instead a constant demand for perfect optionality. Which is something a lot of VC people talk about. When I ask them how quickly they form conviction around who they invest in, they often bring up this idea of optionality. And I’m just like, “That’s basically your way of saying you’re swiping right on a bunch of people you find attractive and then not wanting to commit to who you actually want to date. You want all the options, but you don’t actually want to take that step.”

I want to go back to the split you mentioned in taste - between references on one side, and conviction on the other. If AI is doing that first half very well, and we’re moving into a place over the next three to five years where brands will need to show more conviction, how do you see that dynamic manifesting? Specifically, how might this show up in marketing campaigns or in the way brands operate?

A lot of people are focusing primarily on the aesthetic component of taste, which is one aspect of it. But I think it’s going to show up much more in how brands, beyond marketing, build products and think about experience. It’s really about how you differentiate on a fundamental level.

It’s similar to how artists might create visually similar works, but their process and practice are fundamentally different, which is what makes them distinct and not really comparable. It’s the same with brands, where the ones that develop strong operating systems and ways of thinking - systems that encode their brand philosophy and how they see the world - are the ones that are able to exercise conviction and taste more deliberately. Again, that’s kind of the difference between OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI potentially might get banned by the DOJ, whereas Anthropic shuts down Sora. It’s the difference between the actions of two different AI companies and how taste is expressed through those decisions.

In terms of marketing, I do think brands that have a real point of view will perform better, because anything that is more functional content - lookbook imagery, product imagery, PDP imagery - AI can already emulate and do so effectively. Over time, that likely won’t be the point of differentiation. In a world where a lot of the more fundamental transactional, utility-driven aspects of a brand can be replicated perfectly by AI, brands should be using AI to streamline those areas so they can focus on everything else. In the same way, AI in general should be deployed to handle busy work and more utility-driven tasks, so that it frees us up to focus on bigger-picture thinking - building conviction and working through the higher-level questions.

As a side tangent, I often tell founders not to use AI to solve for taste. I think this is something a lot of people misunderstand. Some startups use AI in a way that helps them focus more on developing taste, while others try to use AI to actually solve for taste itself. For example, that’s where Suno, the AI music generation company, got into a lot of trouble. The founder said he built it to solve the problem of music production, and a lot of musicians pushed back on that idea, questioning whether music is even a “problem” to solve in the first place.

It reveals a very typical tech-founder mindset, where a lot of people in tech and VC are primarily focused on building things that generate value or make money, and in that process they look for “problems” to solve that may not actually be problems. In the pursuit of finding value at all costs, they often end up trying to solve things that aren’t really problems at all. Startups that try to “solve for taste” are not taking the right approach. That’s not the right problem to solve, because taste is something we should be defending and empowering - giving humans more time, bandwidth and space to focus on and cultivate.

There’s an aspect of taste where AI can emulate it, and that’s totally fine and that will always exist. But “solving for taste” isn’t the right framing, because taste, by definition, starts to touch on things that make us distinctly human: conviction, what we believe in, what we hold true. Good taste is developed through friction. To have good taste means you have to experiment. You have to, at some point, wear something and think, “Oh, this really doesn’t work,” or take a risk and have it not pay off. That’s how taste is formed. It’s a process, it’s a practice. So if AI streamlines everything and removes, or de-risks, the friction involved in developing taste - which is a constant state of experimentation, practice, and emulation - then it starts to feel like that’s not a problem worth solving, because it removes the very aspects of taste that make it meaningful and worthwhile.

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It’s not the first time the topic of taste has dominated the discourse. Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld (2024) examined how algorithms flattened culture, with recommendation systems cajoling everything toward the same visual language. But this iteration of the conversation feels different, and I wanted to understand why.

Good taste in the age of AI

That was the starting point for my latest piece for Vogue Business. To unpack it, I spoke to Office of Applied Strategy founder Tony Wang, founder Isabella Burley, creative director , and Violet Grey’s CEO Sherif Guirgis about what it actually means for a brand to have good taste in the age of AI, and why it’s about to become even harder to maintain. Wang put it perfectly:

“Taste is when a brand resists market dynamics. Everything AI does tends to be the most-optimised business decision – it’s calculated to maximise value. But simply following market dynamics isn’t an expression of taste. That’s just doing what the market would do.”

That distinction is important because people now confuse taste with data science. A huge portion of mainstream culture has been built by people who are extremely good at reading metrics like Instagram engagement, SEO traffic, box office figures, audience retention curves, watch time, click through rates, etc. They are effectively predictive analysts, and are identifying inflection points before everyone else does. They know when hemlines are coming back and when audiences are fatigued by minimalism and ready for excess. But they don’t necessarily know how to answer the more difficult question underneath it all: is something actually any good?

What shocks me is how many people cannot articulate why they like something outside of its commercial potential. Something doing well on Instagram, or driving huge box office numbers, does not inherently make it “good”. McDonald’s sells more meals than any restaurant in the world; nobody mistakes that for evidence of culinary genius.

Perhaps it would help if I gave you an example of a “tasteful” decision I would make. Some mornings, over our daily coffee run, my boyfriend and I play a game where we imagine what we would do if we ran different companies. The other day, we landed on Marvel Studios. If I worked there I’d try and make a critically acclaimed superhero film, but something dark like Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy or Star War’s Andor series. He suggested doing it with The Incredible Hulk, using the character as a study of angry young men and a way to explore emotional repression and the fallout of modern male loneliness. Adolescence screenwriter Stephen Graham would be involved in some capacity.

It might not make a billion dollars at the box office, but it might get a long feature in The New Yorker or Vanity Fair asking whether Marvel had finally rediscovered artistic ambition. That kind of cultural repositioning has long-term value that cannot immediately be plotted on a quarterly earnings graph. Of course, that’s the time scale in which they’re expected to prove something worked, which is why they will never do it. Instead, they will pay Robert Downey Jr nearly $100 million to return in yet another Avenger’s movie.

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Maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe the film would bomb and it wouldn’t rehabilitate their image at all. At least I acted on my conviction – something else Wang emphasised in the article. “A key aspect of taste isn’t simply knowing designers or references, it’s the curation and deployment of that knowledge, which leads to the expression of taste,” he told me. “The conviction layer is where it gets interesting, because that’s the part AI can’t do. AI can tell you if something is likely to be a good idea, but it can’t give you the conviction to say: this is the thing, and I’m going to do it.”

It also means backing your judgement without certainty that the market will reward you for it. The problem is that conviction has become materially harder to sustain. Entire industries are contracting. Brands are terrified and as a result, you can feel the desperation radiating off them. It appears in the endless nostalgic plays, the frantic trend-chasing, the inability to commit to any coherent point of view for fear of alienating potential customers. I don’t berate them for it. The margin for error is so small that playing it safe often feels like the viable option. But in that caution and panic, I fear they’re making things worse.

I’m not a total idealist. I get that brands need to make money. However there is a commercial case for this. In a recent interview for a piece I wrote on the return of long-form storytelling via YouTube, also out today, Coach CMO Joon Silverstein told me about the brand’s shift towards cinematic, emotionally resonant films made specifically for the platform, rather than short form content for TikTok.

“We were operating inside a model that had stopped working – optimise performance, chase efficiency, drive loyalty, and treat brand as the garnish. But you can’t optimise your way into desire. And without desire, recognition becomes a fading asset,” she said. Instead the focus went from retention to relevance. “We stopped treating performance as the engine of growth – because performance reflects demand, it doesn’t create it.”

Taste is not the ability to predict what will perform well; machines are increasingly capable of that. Nor can taste function as an aesthetic signal alone anymore, when images are detached from context, circulating endlessly without any indication of how or why they were made. Instead, taste functions as a framework for decision-making and the ability to assign meaning under conditions of abundance. To choose one thing over another for reasons beyond money.

You can read the full article here. I also include a number of examples of how Violet Grey and Climax put this into practice - as always, it’s easier to see it in action than to explain it in theory. Let me know what you think, and what you’d do if you ran a company you hated but were allowed to make a tasteful decision <3

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The championship launched three years ago, and already boasts an impressive roster of celebrity team owners, including Will Smith, Tom Brady, Steve Aoki, Rafa Nadal and LeBron James. Its newest entrant is NBA star Kyle Kuzma (engaged to Winnie Harlow, for the sports agnostic amongst us), who was also in attendance over the weekend. After a boozy pasta making class and a 40 minute choppy boat ride back to the hotel I bumped into him by the veranda, and took the opportunity to ask why he was investing in such a new (and untested) league, which was a question I had been asking myself ever since I received the invite. Kyle pointed to Michael Jordan buying a controlling stake in the Charlotte Hornets (a basketball team, once again for the sports agnostic amongst us) in 2010 for about $200 million, only to sell his majority stake in 2023 at a valuation of roughly $3 billion (!).

Obviously, that’s an extreme example and unlikely to happen again BUT it does highlight how fashion, sports and entertainment have converged into this insanely lucrative ecosystem that EVERYONE is trying to cash in on. The fact that something as niche as electric boat racing can generate this level of excitement says a lot about how much cultural ground sport has claimed. For context: I only started reporting on sports during the 2024 summer Olympics - drawn in by rugby player Ilona Maher’s vlogs and Simone Biles’ tooth gems - yet today Vogue even has a dedicated sports vertical (in partnership with Google, I might add), which is something that would have felt unthinkable just a few years ago.

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Anyway, that’s what I’m working on this week for Vogue Business. In the meantime, I wanted to share a round up of headlines I’ve been following.

The changing norms that define what’s acceptable in culture.

Why are so many influencers speaking at Harvard?

I think the more interesting question is whether Harvard students actually want to hear from influencers? Ten years ago the answer would have been a firm no. Now, I’m not so sure… Honestly, I reckon this recent Alix Earle class was just as subscribed as a Sam Altman one would have been.

Is it really that surprising though? Her new beauty business, Reale Actives, hit $1 million in sales in less than 5 minutes – no small feat at a time when influencer-led launches aren’t the same money makers they once were, as this Business of Fashion article so accurately points out. And say what you want about Matilda Djerf, but her brand was valued at $34.5million at the tender age of 25.

I’m not trying to diminish that success, but it does challenge the traditional idea of what a “Harvard speaker” looks like. Influencer is still, in many circles, a slightly dirty word - hardly the archetype you’d expect at an institution built on (occasionally snooty) intellectual authority. Maybe that’s changing. Influence, after all, is a business and the most successful creators are effectively running highly sophisticated companies. There’s clearly something to learn there.

Still, it baffles my brain that people who would traditionally study that hard to get into Harvard want to hear about how to turn TikTok GRWMs into a beauty brand, because any learnings from the session are predicated on having built a huge online audience… It’s official: influencer creep has hit the highest echelons! In hindsight, the signs were there all along: the President of the United States is literally a former reality TV star.

Has Lena Dunham changed, or have we?

While in Lake Como I finished Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick. I’ve only ever watched season one of Girls, and honestly didn’t know or particularly care much about her. Now I’m firmly in her fan club and have already started season three.

I wasn’t aware of the trolling she faced or the broader criticism around Girls since it wasn’t part of my cultural diet, so it was fascinating hearing about it for the first time directly from her mouth. There’s something really beautiful about letting someone fully own their own story and define what it meant to them. But I do find myself curious about how people who had strong preconceptions about her at the time - or even actively disliked her - might feel about her now. Do they see her differently in hindsight? Or is there even a sense that we owe her an apology? That’s basically the crux of this article.

That’s not to say she is faultless. There are multiple times where I could see why people found her annoying, and there were a few things she fucked up massively on. BUT I think once you reach a certain level of fame, it’s rarely about you anymore, as this article points out with figures like Britney Spears/ Amy Winehouse. You become a projection screen for society’s insecurities, a figure that gets pulled into thinkpieces and reshaped into whatever cultural narrative is most useful at the time. (Please buy Philippa Snow’s It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me for further reading)

Above all, I love how she interrogated the gap between the idea of a famous person and the actual human being behind it. As a society, we still haven’t quite figured out how to hold both at once, even as more people try to occupy that strange, in-between space themselves. Not necessarily at Lena Dunham’s scale, but even someone with a few hundred thousand followers online can become that kind of projection. The world would feel a lot saner if we could learn to separate the two…

Why do a third of Gen Z believe they are psychic?

This headline caught my attention because I’ve been saying that I feel more psychic. Last week I texted two friends who were waiting on good news saying that I had a good feeling they were going to hear about it soon (they did hours later). But beyond coincidence, I’ve been actively trying to sharpen my intuition (more on how in another post).

I liked a line in the article that flagged to one Gen Z interviewee that a lot of what they were describing as being psychic was “just examples of being aware of the world around you” but hated their conclusion: “That young people are surrounded by so much endless economic instability, climate anxiety and political volatility that they are soothed by anything that might give them the illusion of control.”

Despite AI/ algorithms/ modern life etc atrophying our critical thinking skills and bulldozing our attention spans, I still believe that people are questioning things like never before as a lot of the shadowy systems (hello pedophile cabal) come to light. What gets framed as premonition can often be explained more simply: humans are highly attuned pattern-recognition machines. We subconsciously register tone, body language, inconsistencies and repeated behaviours, then assemble them into a feeling or prediction that seems to come out of nowhere. In reality, it’s rapid, experience-based processing rather than anything supernatural. Now if that isn’t an argument for us all #loggingoff and paying attention more..

The digital systems that shape how we transact and behave.

I love Lauren Sherman’s podcast Fashion People and I love Brendahashtag so I REALLY loved this episode. I was especially struck by a conversation they had about AI, where Lauren said that her husband uses it for editing, and her stance on it is that if she needs to use it for something, she will.

Taylor Lorenz also wrote this great article here evaluating how much content on Substack is generated by AI. It goes without saying that this is bad, but I found this paragraph intriguing:

“My feelings about what I discovered are mixed. Competing on Substack is hard. Out of the top 20 Substack Bestsellers in Technology there is only one woman: me. I spend hours on my newsletter every week. And so learning that a significant portion of my competition in Technology is leveraging LLMs has made me wonder if I should experiment more with automation. For example, using AI to auto-generate my link round ups at the end of my newsletter. (If I do this, I will disclose my AI use).”

Having done lots of reporting at Vogue Business on attitudes towards AI (and now seeing similar debates now appearing in BOF) I am curious how this moment will evolve. The first wave of hysteria and flat-out resistance won’t last in its present form. It will evolve, and in doing so, it will inevitably change our outlook on it (and our boundaries of acceptable AI use), as well as the form of writing itself.

I’ve even felt that shift personally. Having been trained at Vogue Business to write in factual, non opinionated ways, I’ve had to consciously retrain myself to write more like how I speak on Substack. Partly to avoid the growing suspicion that anything too polished might be AI-generated. Partly because it’s more fun to do anyway. I’ve noticed other writers grappling with the same thing. I particularly liked what Shaad magazine said below:

Either way I’m not worried, as Taylor says here: “Clearly, there is still a strong desire for human-written content and analysis. The fact that two-thirds of Substack Bestsellers don’t appear to use AI at all, proves that there’s still value in producing human-written content and that human-written content can result in financial success.”

Can AI save luxury retail

Last time I was in the Vogue Business office, I was chatting with another editor about how all we seem to be doing is talking about AI. It reminded me of the pandemic, when I was working at The Face magazine (RIP), and went from talking about literally everything, to talking about how literally everything was affected by Covid-19 – from how it cancelled horoscopes (because imagine your horoscope telling you you’re going on a trip or getting married…) to what social distancing strippers are doing in Magic City, Atlanta (virtual lap dances in case you were wondering).

That said, I’ve been tracking how AI might impact retail since it’s been so badly upended in recent years. I used to think the pain point of not knowing what to buy or where to find wasn’t real, until I recently decided to re-do my summer wardrobe. It made me realise how much I rely on Vinted’s algorithm to surface things I might like, or, on the flip side, how difficult it is to find something specific, like a heel at a certain height with a particular detail around the tone. So I’m quite into this AI search technology Verneek, which promises to do exactly that…

The logic of consumption and commodified desire.

The Devil Wear’s Prada inflation index

It’s hard to grasp just how insane luxury price hikes are so I love these kinds of infographics. Side note, the only bit of PR for Devil Wear’s Prada 2 I’d still love to see is Anna Wintour in conversation with the author of the book, Lauren Weisberger.

Tech bros are obsessed with taste

Conversations around taste are so back. After it first went mainstream in 2022 following Kyle Chayka’s incredible book Filterworld, looking at how algorithms (which are AI) flattened taste, I’m tracking how the development of LLMs (also AI but even more intense) will further erode it.

I can’t wait to share an article I filed last week for Vogue Business ALL about this featuring insight from very tasteful people like Isabella Burley, Tony Wang, Cassandra Grey and Juliana Salazar.

What we wear and what it says about our values

Techno-fascist fashion: Why Silicon Valley is moving into menswear

Speaking of tech bros being into taste.

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Disclaimer: this isn’t (for the most part) a taste-based in/out list. It’s a read on changing consumer behaviour, retail dynamics and marketing trends - what’s gaining ground, and what’s falling away. I do not condone all of these developments.

OUT: Influencers as advertisers; IN: Influencers as storefronts

Is it just me or does it feel like everyone is suddenly making serious money off affiliate links? One creator I follow, Mia McGrath, said in February she made £27,337 off of affiliates alone. Another friend who runs a popular shopping Substack says she easily makes high four figures a month.

Part of it is that the whole affiliate setup feels more legit than it used to. Platforms like ShopMy and Conde Nast’s new storefront Vette are making it really easy to plug everything in one place and actually see what’s working. At the same time, every influencer I’ve spoken to recently has said that brand deals are not what they used to be. Budgets feel tighter, campaigns are smaller, there’s more back-and-forth, deliverables are creeping up, timelines are shorter… it just isn’t as easy or as lucrative as was a few years ago, which, given the state of the world, isn’t surprising.

Perhaps that’s why people are naturally shifting toward income streams they have more control over, and in the process, we’re seeing creators shift from being advertisers to retailers. Ironic, given how rocky things have been for a lot of e-retailers over the past few years. Still, it ties into one of my predictions that Amazon Fashion is going to be huge in the next few years - especially as more people care less about curation or “vibes,” and just want their clothes as fast and as cheaply as possible.

OUT: Sustainably made marketing; IN: Human made marketing

My latest Vogue Business piece is a big anti-AI slop marketing playbook, and one thing that really stood out to me is how hard brands are now trying to prove they’re not using AI, at least in their marketing assets. Fitting, as I saw someone recently say that this whole anti-ai slop positioning is going to replace sustainability as the marketing narrative. Craft as a marketing currency has already been building for a while, and it feels like “made by a human” is becoming the latest shorthand for “we’re a good, thoughtful brand” in the same way sustainability used to be - just with more focus on process, not just principles.

However it’s not like AI use is this clean, binary thing where you’re either “pure” or “cheating”. It’s already baked into loads of processes in ways we don’t even really question. Even for me, way before LLMs became this massive cultural thing, I was using Otter.ai to transcribe interviews. That is AI, but it doesn’t feel controversial at all.

So where exactly is the line? Is it more pronounced in marketing campaigns, where the goal is to sell aspiration? Or does it come down to how many creatives are displaced in the process? Or is it simply about what people have become used to? I’m really curious to see how this shifts over the next few years - whether human-made holds its value, or if it ends up mattering less as AI just becomes part of the baseline. WGSN is predicting that by 2028 no one will really care anymore, which feels bold but also kind of plausible. One to watch for sure.

OUT: Instagram snark; IN: Investing in physical media

RIP The Face magazine </3

Snark on Instagram has become so unbearable to me. It’s so easy to throw text on a screen and be dismissive, whereas formats that demand more effort tend to push you toward what you actually care about.

Having worked on three issues of Basement Magazine, it’s some of the most labour-intensive work I’ve ever done. The amount that goes into it is kind of insane: coming up with ideas, commissioning, organising shoots, troubleshooting the million things that go wrong, proofreading things over and over, refining design, making sure the order feels coherent. There’s no way you’d put that much time into something just to complain that something else is shit. Everything I worked on during that time came from a place of genuine love, because nothing else would carry me through that much effort.

As those kinds of outlets where you can invest that much time and care disappear, it makes sense that everything becomes more snarky. Instagram is full of it because it takes almost no effort. Bring make high-friction media creation!

OUT: Red carpet method dressing; IN: Red carpet deal making

Remember when all anyone could talk about was method dressing? Margot Robbie doing the full Barbie press tour cosplay, or Zendaya dressing in-theme for Spider-Man premieres? Thank God we’ve moved on a bit. Now it feels like people are finally talking more openly about the red carpet as what it actually is, which is basically a deal-making arena.

I read something recently that I loved about why we’re all so obsessed with the 90s, and part of it was this idea that back then, you didn’t have to think about the entire machine behind what someone was wearing. For example, someone could just show up to a premiere in jeans and it didn’t feel like a missed opportunity. The focus was on the film, not the fashion ecosystem orbiting it.

Now it’s kind of impossible not to see the machinery. Styling, ambassadorships, placements, even those supposedly “organic” appearances.. it’s all increasingly structured, and often part of much bigger commercial agreements, one that is not even hidden anymore. Multiple publications have recently begun talking about awards season in terms of deals. Maybe it’s just me, but I can see this very quickly turning off the average cinema go-er…

OUT: Dupes; IN: The high street collaborating with luxury creative directors

Or at the very least, it feels like the whole dupe conversation has really quietened down. There was a point where it was everywhere in constant discourse, people calling things out, side-by-sides, “run don’t walk” energy, DHgate like-for-like comparisons, and now it just doesn’t feel as loud.

Maybe this is a stretch, but I do think there’s something slightly funny happening. The cycle used to be runway → high street → Shein, and now a lot of the greats are just going straight to high street, whether it's John Galliano’s appointment to Zara, Zac Polsen at Gap, Clare Waight Keller at Uniqlo. Instead of filtering down through diluted versions, they’re bypassing that process entirely and going directly to the source, creating more accessible price points from the outset. It makes sense: the aspirational consumer is completely dead in luxury, so they have to approach them from a different angle or just lose them completely to dupe culture.

OUT: Hype; IN: Lore

I wrote something recently about how designers are increasingly tapping into their own personal history as a way to create meaning and build lore in a landscape where scale alone just isn’t cutting it anymore. You can see it in moments like Jacquemus casting his grandma as the brand’s first ambassador, or Jonathan Anderson inviting atelier artisan Paulette Boncoure, who began working at Dior in 1947, to attend his debut couture show. Even i-D doing a whole issue on lore feels telling. It points to the idea that what people are responding to now isn’t just aesthetics or volume, but the sense that there’s an ongoing story that builds over time, rather than appearing fully formed and then disappearing just as quickly.

You can’t have lore if you’re constantly info-dumping or churning things out at full speed. There has to be space for people to piece things together, which is why it feels like such an interesting counterpoint to generative AI, where the whole selling point is basically infinite output at once. It also sits in contrast to the hype era that defined the industry from around 2017 to 2024, from peak logomania to when the runway gimmick lost its impact. Instead what actually seems to be sticking now is that more layered kind of meaning that lore builds over time. Because then people aren’t just consuming, they’re following, and that holds attention for way longer.

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OUT: Men in finance; IN: Men in AI vibe coding

Chat, the girls are no longer looking for a man in finance. That Interview Magazine “Meet the finest boys in finance” story broke the illusion, or at least, the comments underneath the Instagram post indicated that we are collectively over them.

I keep content around vibe coding, aka people who use AI to prompt code that easily builds apps and websites, which feels like the next iteration of the archetype. The New York Times recently profiled Matt Gallagher, who reportedly built a company to a billion dollars in revenue using AI, pulling it together in just two months, with around $20,000 and a stack of AI tools. The startup, Medvi, is a telehealth company selling GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, and it’s projected to hit $1.8B in its first year. Gallagher and his brother are the only humans involved in the whole operation.

Over the past few weeks, my feed has been completely saturated with people evangelising AI vibe coding, framing it as this now-or-never opportunity, and that if you don’t get on board, you’re locking yourself into permanent underclass status. Meanwhile the “Claude gap” in relationships has replaced swag gap relationships as the cardinal sin. Girls, mark my words, this is about to dominate a lot of first date chat this summer…

OUT: Wanting to go on Love Island; IN: Joining the manosphere

I’ve been watching more HS Tikky Tokky and I genuinely think he would have done so well on Love Island if he’d been on during that Kem and Chris era. In a weird way, the pipelines aren’t that different. Love Island is framed as being about finding a partner, but underneath it is this very public performance of validation. Looksmaxxing spaces claim they’re not really about relationships (as Clavicular often says), but they still revolve around the same idea: the kind of validation that comes from who you could attract. It’s not the same thing, but it definitely rhymes.

More broadly, Love Island acts as a mirror for how people understand desirability, status, attractiveness, social capital, gender dynamics, popularity, etc. What’s interesting now is that those conversations have splintered and migrated into more niche, stranger online spaces. Here the manosphere has started to resemble a kind of get-rich-quick ecosystem, offering the same pulls of visibility and money, especially for disenfranchised young men. While it’s blown up in the US, in the UK it doesn’t feel as culturally dominant as it once did, and I think a lot of the people who might’ve gone on Love Island five years ago are now gravitating toward the manosphere instead. Bleak.

OUT: The suffix -core; IN: Incel-slang-maxxing

RIP -core. Cause of death: Maxxing.

OUT: “Articles to read instead of doomscrolling”; IN: Rawdogging boredom

I was fully guilty of this so absolutely no shade to anyone still doing it, but I do think that the whole content format is completely done now. You can feel when something tips from “everywhere” to “okay we get it,” and we’re firmly there. Of course, evil doesn’t die, it just reinvents itself. The newer version of this I’m seeing is all this “rawdogging boredom” or “nothing maxxing content.

There are only so many times you can watch someone explain that we’re all online too much… online. Best case scenario is that we end up consuming less content about consuming less content. But right now it feels like we’re stuck in this weird loop where people are still packaging the idea of “logging off” into something you can watch, like, engage with, share, etc, which is pretty ponzi-scheme-y. It feels icky to me that the value comes from naming the problem, only to turn it into more content that sustains the very system it’s critiquing. I just hope the next real shift isn’t another aesthetic or format, but actually posting less.

OUT: The pink pilates princess; IN: 2000s yoga mom aesthetic

Did you know that the Pink Pilates Princess wasn’t just a fun TikTok lifestyle aesthetic but actually a key consumer group, according to Spotify?

Well, maybe not for long. What I keep noticing instead is this shift toward something the “2000s yoga mom aesthetic”. Less $100 polyester Alo leggings and more intuitive, manifest energy wrapped in natural fibre baggy workout gear. Very The Secret, very Addison Rae in her current era.

OUT: Visibility; IN: Durability

We’ve now been through so many boom-and-bust cycles with influencers and platforms. Vine, Tumblr, early Instagram, TikTok waves, Substack spikes… there’s always this moment where something feels like the place to be, and then almost as quickly, it just loses energy. If your whole thing is built on visibility within one of those ecosystems, it’s kind of fragile by default.

The focus is moving toward durability. Not just being known, but being able to last. Having something that holds even when the algorithm changes or the platform cools off or the audience moves somewhere else. That’s where having a really defined, almost stubbornly clear base comes in. Not even necessarily a “brand” in the polished sense, but more like a point of view that people actually recognise and come back for. Something that doesn’t fully depend on where it’s being distributed.

OUT: Looking for your purpose; IN: Following your pull

Maybe my next -coded should be about cultivating intuition…

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That was very much the case with my latest Vogue Business story, “Is the Girlboss Making a Comeback?” I had the pleasure of interviewing the singular Sharmadean Reid - founder of WAH Nails, Beauty Stack/Stack World and now 39BC, and arguably the UK’s most visible girlboss of that era - and I wanted to share more of our conversation here. We get into what that first wave got right and wrong, the tradwife turn, the shifting, often contradictory way we treat female ambition today, and what a potential girlboss 2.0 might look like.

After (or if) you’ve read the Vogue Business piece, the Q&A below expands upon the ideas we could only touch on in the article. No gatekeeping girlbosses here!!!

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

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Amy Francombe: During that first wave of “Girlboss,” you were very much put on the front line - in the UK, people really claimed you as our version of it. As someone who was actively building businesses at the time, what do you think that era got right, and what did it get wrong?

Sharmadean Reid: I think what it got right was visibility. I never really understood why people were so interested in my story, but then it occurred to me that no one had really seen a young woman do that before. When I opened my first business, I was 24 - and most 24-year-olds hadn’t seen someone their age running something like that. We didn’t realise it was possible.

A lot of it was naivety on my part, because I didn’t realise it wasn’t normal. I was very close to friends who ran nightclubs, so starting a startup didn’t feel that different - it just felt like a continuation of what my friends were already doing. But people became quite obsessed with WAH Nails - not just the salon, but me and the story behind it. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I remember our first major press were The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. I looked terrible, I sounded terrible, because I was just a graduate stylist and raver. I always say I was an accidental entrepreneur. I thought I was opening a nail salon for me and my friends, not building a business in the way it became.

In terms of what it got wrong, I think there were two things happening at the same time. The first was the industry - the broader business and finance world - expecting young women to understand business at the same level as a 45-year-old man who’d been doing it for decades. There was no recognition that youth and ambition don’t equal experience. Instead of mentorship or access to networks, a lot of people took advantage.

The second was the audience - young people looking up to these figures in business. I don’t think they realised the pedestal they were putting us on, or the pressure that created. There was also a desire for a constant façade, especially as social media was rising. It’s worth noting that the rise of Girlboss coincided with the democratisation of social media and the ability for anyone to be visible.

AF: That first era felt hopeful to me. It made me feel like things were possible. Since the takedown era, though, and from what I’m seeing now, it feels much more hopeless. With that in mind, I’m intrigued by what you make of society’s attitudes toward female ambition. It often feels like we elevate women and then can’t tolerate them succeeding in a deeply patriarchal system that doesn’t actually want true disruption.

SR: When I think about the patriarchal aspect in business and what went wrong for me - speaking only for myself - it felt like a “last in, first out” dynamic when the chips were down.

Another important context is that the girlboss era happened during a very rich market. Capital was everywhere. Cheap capital was everywhere. It was relatively easy to fundraise. That’s part of why many women were able to build venture-backed businesses, there was capital available, and investors were excited about female-led consumer brands.

But when things went bad, especially during the pandemic, I found that women were “last in, first out”. It became much harder to raise capital because I hadn’t built up a gender-based or race-based reputation within those networks. I wasn’t given the best engineers. I wasn’t helped to hire the best people. It was a slow, insidious network effect rather than something overtly malicious.

It’s very human behaviour. We love helping others when resources are plentiful - when food is plentiful, we help strangers. But when food becomes scarce, we help our own. I think that was a big part of it. It was very hard for women to move from seed to Series A, or Series A to Series B. Each fundraising jump is a chasm when you don’t have established networks. Meanwhile, I saw many men who had failed able to start their second or third companies quite easily in a way I just didn’t see women being able to do.

I don’t know any woman from that era whose company failed and who then got a second chance from venture capital in the same way. The women I know who are on their second or third companies have mostly bootstrapped for a long time or raised from angels only.

AF: I’m really glad you brought that up, because I’m also speaking to venture capitalists for this piece to understand the broader landscape. There was girlboss feminism as an ideology - something you could adopt even at school, a mindset shift towards being entrepreneurial and claiming what’s yours.

But that’s different from the industry actually welcoming women and giving them true power and capital to actualise those ambitions. I think those two things often get muddled. It’s easy to mock certain surface elements of the movement - the slogans, the aesthetics - while overlooking what it actually meant for women to raise capital at that level for the first time. That did break down real barriers.

It’s interesting that from girlboss feminism we’ve moved into things like burnout feminism, trad wives, and this “stay-at-home girlfriend” territory. I’m wondering what you make of that… whether you think it’s a good thing, a bad thing, or whether we should be more discerning about this shift.

SR: You know, my career was never about any negativity towards people who chose to be full-time stay-at-home mums. Especially because I was a young mother myself. I always say the first six months, the first year, was the happiest time of my life. If I could have been a full-time mother, I easily would have been.

I think the tradwife movement we’re seeing now is confused, though, because you’re not a tradwife if you’re making content. You’re a content creator. Anyone who is a content creator knows it’s stressful. I hate making content. If your family life is content, then you’re working and probably earning more than your partner. I saw that in Secret Lives of Mormon Wives - those women are working incredibly hard. To me, being a true stay-at-home person means your time is your own. I don’t think that’s true for many of the women we see online as tradwives.

I don’t think this is anything new. There have always been people who have chosen that path. On the Stack World app, since we launched in 2021, I’ve had a job listed called “CEO of my household”. It’s always been there. Because it is a full-time job. But again, the algorithm and media are showcasing a fantasy version of what it means to be a tradwife - just like they showcased a fantasy version of what it meant to be a girlboss. They’re working. They have jobs.

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AF: With girlboss culture, there was a fantasy of autonomy and empowerment, of not being dependent, of rejecting traditional gender roles. Now it feels like the women being platformed - even though they are working - are presenting a lifestyle that leans into more traditional family values or expectations of women.

SR: But has that ever not been the case? From I Love Lucy onwards, there’s always been a conservative or traditional media face. Think about Britney, Christina, and the other one - I can’t remember her name, maybe Hilary Duff. There’s always one who’s conservative, one who’s more sexual, one who’s the baby. That dynamic is constant.

The question isn’t whether we have limited choices, or whether we’re making the wrong choice. The question is: are we really choosing? Did I really want to be a girlboss? Does she really want to be a tradwife? Is the choice actually hers, or has she been led there by what media presents as a successful version of womanhood?

Everything about this is complex. And we haven’t even touched on how tied it is to capitalism and productivity.

There’s nothing wrong with tradwives in the true sense of the word - a stay-at-home “CEO of your household”. That’s a lot of work. What I struggle with is when it’s presented as just another aesthetic to slot into - another version of womanhood to perform.

That’s where it becomes complicated. Because a tradwife, a girlboss, or any of these labels can only be recognised if they fit into certain symbols. Are you only a tradwife if you live in the countryside, raise animals, and cook everything from scratch? Or could you be a tradwife if you live in the city and take your kid to museums every day? Would you not be viewed as one if you didn’t fit the aesthetic?

When I think about how I raised my son - taking work out of it - everything was homemade. We were out every day. I would have homeschooled him if I’d had the time. So did I not fit that archetype because I wasn’t living on a farm? I just think it’s the straitjackets of these female archetypes that are the problem.

AF: In order for women to truly have the choice to pursue business or leadership - and you’re right, it’s also completely valid to want to stay at home - but to genuinely choose that, rather than monetising it and becoming beholden to capitalism through another archetype, we need different ways of doing business. I think part of the downfall of that first wave was that it stitched a woman’s head onto the same exploitative business model. You’ve also launched your new brand. I’m curious how you’re running it differently. How you’re making it feel less extractive.

SR: I’m only six months in, which makes me laugh because it’s such a baby business, yet we’re doing so much.

Firstly, I have a male co-founder and we’ve had very open conversations about this. He’s the same age as me and took a similar kind of sabbatical at around the same time. He’s also been through the mill of running exhausting businesses.

From the start, we agreed we don’t want to build a business that burns us out again. That’s the simple truth. We both want to build something long-term and community-based. We’re not building it just to make a lot of money and buy more handbags.

We’re fully remote. We semi-take Fridays off - it’s unspoken, but people might not be at their desks on Fridays. I work very intuitively. How I feel that day shapes how I work. Somehow I always get the work done, but I don’t sit at my desk for the sake of it. I’m also approaching growth differently. Rather than trying to build a DTC, VC-backed startup in the classic tech style, I’m asking: how can I take the traditional beauty scaling method and mix it with modern data and what I learned from tech?

That means starting with a wholesale strategy, which aligns more with my strengths. This matters because startup culture, especially during the girlboss era, glorified “building the plane while flying it”. I love that energy, but when that’s 80% of your life instead of 20%, it creates chronic stress. You’re constantly thinking: how do I solve this problem? And the next one. And the next one.

With this business, I’m saying: there’s a playbook. There’s a predictable path for scaling a product-based bath and body business. I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last. There have been companies doing this since the 1960s, the 1980s, the 1990s. There is a relatively predictable path to scale.

So instead of putting my body and brain under constant stress, I’ve written out what I think the 10-year playbook looks like, and we’re working through it step by step. This sounds minor, but it’s huge. I used to wake up in the middle of the night reciting my pitch deck. My first waking thought would be something like, “How are we going to acquire more beauty professionals in Italy if we don’t have Italian language support?” It was constant. You could never turn your brain off.

That was the culture: non-stop problem-solving from morning until night. I don’t think the human brain is meant to sustain that level of pressure for that long. Now, I’m not constantly problem-solving. I’m ideating and creating within a plan. I’m delivering on a strategy rather than inventing one under duress.

AF: I think the difference is that traditional models, often built by men, have been hostile to the body, the mind, and society. I’m curious whether you’re seeing this shift more broadly within your networks, among your peers. Is this becoming more industry-wide? Is it a turning point?

SR: A lot of my friends are doing the same. It’s interesting you ask that. Many of them are launching product-based businesses with clear playbooks, aka, businesses where they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

There’s a growing understanding that you don’t need to start from zero every time. And this is deeply linked to self-worth, particularly female self-worth. It’s similar to conversations around “black excellence”, where you feel you have to do something completely groundbreaking and innovative to justify your place. When actually, you could just do something normal. Something obvious. And that’s fine.

When I was working on the pitch deck for 39BC, it was interesting not to have a massive, world-changing idea upfront. In tech, you’re always expected to lead with some enormous vision. Eventually, I articulated the “big idea” - about bathing as the next frontier of luxury wellness and bathhouse culture - but that came after refining the deck over and over again.

Women in that first wave were expected to run businesses and simultaneously save feminism and the world. The language around them suggested they had to change everything, elevate womankind globally. Meanwhile, men were simply allowed to run businesses. In this next phase, it’s important that women are allowed to just have businesses without having to carry the weight of transforming society. Otherwise, we put them back on that pedestal, and it becomes easy to knock them down again.

A lot of this ties back to self-worth. And I’m very honest about this: much of my stress during my startup years was self-inflicted. It was wrapped up in layers: being a woman, being a Black woman, being working class. There were so many layers I had to unpack during my healing journey. Why did I choose that industry? Whose approval was I seeking? Why did I want a pat on the head? These dynamics are complex.

One of the things I talk about a lot is how, when I reflect on my career, I notice a pattern: I climb a ladder to reach success, and then the moment I’m accepted in that world, I jump off and start climbing a new ladder. To me, that was low self-worth. It was me constantly putting myself in positions where I felt I had to prove myself over and over again. Why would I keep doing that?

AF: Do you think there’s still space for the term “girlboss”? I’m not even sure if you identify with it. I know it was a label put on you. It feels like it’s creeping back into the vernacular. Should we retire it, or is there room for it in this next iteration?

SR: I actually think it’s a useful word because it’s a catch-all that people understand. I’m not anti-“girlboss”. I know some people are. A lot of feminised versions of things can feel annoying, but this isn’t just a feminised version of “boss”. It represents a specific culture - its own standalone moment.

I don’t mind the term. I jokingly refer to it as my “girlboss era”. When I say that, people understand I’m referring not just to ambition, but to how I was living and what I was doing. It represents my 20s and 30s. How could I be ashamed of that? It was my life. When I look back on it, I still feel joy. It was a very distinct cultural moment. It felt hopeful.

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The first time I truly understood death came via the matrimonial misadventures of Henry VIII.

Despite having learnt that asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs, pirates made people walk the plank into shark-infested waters, and the Aztecs carried out human sacrifices to the gods, none of these stories made death feel real to me. Instead, it was the mnemonic divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived that cracked something open in my head.

Maybe it was the sing-song rhythm, or the fact that it’s such an insane moment in history, but I vividly remember that being the first time I grasped the permanence of death. If Anne Boleyn had her head chopped off, she couldn’t just go to dinner afterwards… so where did she go? If someone could decide that for her, could someone decide it for me? I remember asking my poor teacher in front of a classroom of seven-year-olds who were, thanks to me, now being ushered toward the same life-altering realisation.

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Up until then, it wasn’t as though people who died were gone-gone, and it certainly wasn’t a thing that could touch my own life. It felt like a storytelling device, something in the same category as dragons or wicked stepmothers, a plot mechanism rather than a real rule of the world. Yet through the gout-addled, toy-throwing behaviour of a Tudor monarch, the terms of life became uncomfortably clear. Death is coming for all of us. Most of us won’t know when it will happen. There’s no way to know for certain what comes after. And no matter how rich, clever, good-looking, lucky, brave or interesting you are, not a single person who has ever lived has managed to outrun it.

Whenever I stop and really think about death, I feel that same bottom-pit-of-my-stomach-sick feeling I did the first time it properly sank in. I suspect most of us do, which may explain why, as a society, we seem to have launched into a frantic round of negotiations with the universe. Look around. Everywhere you turn someone is leaning over the cosmic counter trying to haggle for a few extra decades under the banner of longevity. What if we cold-plunge at dawn and swallow NAD like communion? What if we track our REM cycles with monastic discipline and drink creatine with the solemnity of a sacrament?? If we supplement hard enough, fast long enough, sauna frequently enough and never allow our inflammation to get out of hand, surely the universe will extend our lease... right????

No one is negotiating harder than the modern apostles of our new “Don’t Die” religion: billionaires. Peter Thiel has spoken openly about fighting death as though mortality were a hostile takeover he intends to block. Jeff Bezos has invested heavily in Altos Labs, a research company devoted to cellular rejuvenation, operating on the premise that ageing is a software bug that can be fixed. And then there is the movement’s most devoted disciple, Bryan Johnson, who has effectively turned his body into a fully monitored data centre. Through his project Blueprint, he tracks organ age, biomarkers, sleep cycles and the velocity of his boners in an effort to reverse the biological clock, after which he occasionally decamps to Paris to parade the results on the runway.

The rest of us dabble in smaller, more terrestrial versions of the same fantasy. Perhaps you own an Oura ring. Or you’ve tried polynucleotides, and are debating whether to try human growth peptides next. Red-light therapy masks have somehow migrated from dermatologists’ offices into people’s bedrooms. Vibration plates, too, have reappeared from whatever early-2000s infomercial they escaped from. Of course none of this quite amounts to immortality but taken together it begins to resemble a modest everyday attempt at the same wager the billionaires are making at scale.

The trouble with the modern longevity obsession is not merely that it is somewhat futile but that it produces a strangely lifeless vision of life. The routines required to defeat death begin to resemble the habits of someone who has already stopped living. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient way of transforming the messy, joyful business of being alive into a long-term maintenance plan for a body that will, in all likelihood, still die anyway. Yet we continue to chase it - myself very much among the guilty - as humans have done for as long as they’ve known they were going to die...

Immortality has always had wealthy patrons

Longevity may be the defining obsession of modern culture, but the desire itself is anything but new. Across centuries, the wealthy have pursued immortality with a blend of ingenuity and grotesquery. Diane de Poitiers reportedly drank liquid gold in 16th-century France in the hope of preserving her beauty. In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII was transfused with the blood of young boys in a desperate bid for rejuvenation; he died, and so did they. Elizabeth Báthory allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her skin supple, a skincare routine that makes sheet masks look positively restrained. Two centuries later, the eminent neurologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard enthusiastically injected himself with extracts from guinea pig and dog testicles in the belief that they might restore youthful vitality, while the surgeon Serge Voronoff grafted monkey testicles onto ageing men in hopes of rejuvenation (in his defence, we do some approximation of this with salmon now).

Immortality has always exerted a particular gravitational pull on the rich. Partly this is just the awkward arithmetic of abundance: if your resources vastly exceed what can be meaningfully deployed within a single lifetime, the true bottleneck is no longer capital but time. When you have solved most ordinary problems the only remaining constraint is the one thing money cannot easily buy: more years.

On a more psychological level, money approximates a minor form of divinity. It suspends certain consequences, expands the field of choice and shields the body from many of the harsher negotiations of reality. If you can bend markets, influence elections and redesign your own face, it becomes increasingly difficult to accept that your cells should continue ageing like everyone else’s. When so much else in life has proved negotiable, it’s no wonder biology starts to look like an inconvenient contract that needs to be amended.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that the ultra-wealthy have always turned their attention toward the last remaining frontier: death. The ancient Greeks understood something essential about this dynamic. The true distinction between gods and mortals, they believed, was not power, beauty or knowledge but deathlessness. Gods did not die. Humans did. Today’s elites, having blurred so many other boundaries of power and privilege, appear increasingly reluctant to accept this final demarcation. If you already live like a god, it becomes tempting to pursue the one credential still missing from the résumé.

In Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, the writer Joanna Ebenstein describes death as the “ultimate insult,” precisely because of this refusal to co-operate. Death resists our attempts to manage, optimise or extend life indefinitely - a particularly galling fact in a culture that has grown accustomed to treating almost everything as fixable.

But rather than taking offence at this insult, Ebenstein embraces it. Mortality, she argues, is not life’s defect but the condition that gives it shape. Without the knowledge that our time is limited, existence would stretch into something shapeless and indefinitely deferrable - an endless series of tomorrows in which nothing quite needs to happen today. For centuries philosophers have returned to some version of the same conclusion: death is not merely the tragic endpoint of life but the deadline that gives it urgency. It is the constraint that forces decisions, the pressure that transforms time from an abstract concept into something precious. This, of course, is a lovely idea in theory. In practice, many of us are far less philosophical about the matter.

The problem with living forever

Before I continue I should clarify: I am not writing this from a high horse. I am writing it from a dermatologist’s waiting room. I have spoken to more doctors than I can count, for more pieces than I can remember, about everything from how stem cells might one day enable scarless surgery to the possibility of 3D-printed skin and bone. I’ve flown to South Korea and subjected my face to eleven lasers and several skin boosters in one sitting, like a sacrificial offering to collagen. I am devout to botox. I tithe to serums. I own a £300 red light therapy mask. I don’t smoke or vape, and even in my drunkest states I usually manage to stop myself from having a cheeky drag. I tell my friends it’s because I’ve had pneumonia and tuberculosis and it’s bad for my lungs, which is a respectable and medically sound reason not to smoke. In reality, the majority of the time I resist is because I remind myself that it will prematurely age my face.

We may not all be megalomaniacal billionaires trying to conquer death through venture capital and blood transfusions, but we are hardly immune to the same fear. Much of the longevity discourse today revolves around extending life while preserving beauty. Taken at face value, it sounds rather wonderful, even if it is wildly unrealistic. It is certainly less confronting than the alternative, which involves accepting that one day I will be old (and look old) and either remember being seventeen as if it were yesterday, or not remember it at all. Both possibilities scare the absolute shit out of me. Fuck it. Someone pass me some peptides!!!

The 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson once wrote, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Johnson meant it as a warning about hedonism - the temptation to blunt the discomfort of consciousness and our awareness of death through intoxication and reckless abandon. Today the impulse he identified has mutated. Instead of turning ourselves into beasts through drunkenness and excess, we increasingly submit our bodies to a different kind of frenzy: injections, trackers, supplements, blood panels, clinics promising cellular renewal - many of which I’m guilty of myself (!!). The aesthetic is sleeker but the behaviour is no less animalistic. We poke, prod and biohack ourselves with almost feral determination, half-machine and half-creature, all in the hope of outrunning the unease of being a fragile, finite organism.

In much of the Western imagination, this impulse has turned ageing itself into a technical problem, something to be managed through increasingly elaborate and expensive routines. The implicit promise is that with enough discipline, data and disposable income we might hold the process at bay, hovering indefinitely in a carefully maintained approximation of youth. Yet not every culture imagines longevity in such nakedly consumptive, anti-old-person terms, as though we were locked in a biological arms race with time itself.

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Every few months I get weirdly in my head about posting online. As much as I want to be someone who believes it isn’t that deep, I can’t push past how genuinely strange it is that people who have never met me can form a working theory of who I am based on a grid of images. Stranger still is that I do the exact same thing. There are people I’ve never spoken to (let alone shared a room with) yet I feel I have a sense of who they are, or at least who they’re trying to be.

Most of us have developed this skill by now, partly because there are so many opportunities to practice it. We log our films on Letterboxd, curating a top four that signals taste without trying too hard (something art house, one left-field choice to show range, maybe an animation like Shrek to be relatable). We catalogue our reading on Goodreads. We know which books you’re meant to be seen being read (All About Love), what books to not be (ACOTAR). We know which drink order reads as chic (martini) and which have tipped into self-parody (matcha).

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None of this is written down anywhere, yet together these choices start to resemble a shared language, one in which fluency carries big rewards. First, they help us place one another quickly. If social media has become our main site of interaction, it’s not just influencers who benefit from a certain level of self-branding. There are people in your workplace, on your campus, in your extended friendship group who you’ll encounter online long before you ever meet them in person. Why not make a good first impression? Second, getting the cues right can come with tangible downstream benefits: attention, relevance, invitations, connections, clout, brand deals. We live in an era of highly visible rebrands, where posting differently can materially alter someone’s life (hello Grammy-nominated Addison Rae).

Because we understand this, almost nothing is taken at face value anymore. The question quickly shifts from ‘what is this?’ to ‘why are they doing this?’ That subtext is easy to spot in others because the same audit is constantly being run internally. We notice the military jacket or the Labubu because, on some subconscious level, we’ve already done the math. Where would this place me on the trend-adoption curve?

Once you start reading the world this way, suspicion spreads fast. Within this framework, everyone eventually becomes implicated. Addison Rae is performative. So is the man reading a novel on the Tube. So is the person who posts too much, and the person who posts too little. Soon, life starts to feel like a land mine of potentially performative gestures. There’s activism and performative activism. Masculinity and performative masculinity. Intellectualism and performative intellectualism. Every action seems to come with a shadow version of itself.

No one wants to be performative, and even less to be seen as such. The accusation suggests emptiness, that an action is driven by optics rather than belief. But it also rests on a comforting fantasy that somewhere, somehow, a pure, unmediated gesture still exists, untouched by audience or incentive. We’re left in a strange limbo: hyper-aware of ourselves, monitoring how we come across, while remaining hyper-critical of others. Or, as Jemima Kirke once said…

We might be thinking about ourselves too much

In the early 1900s, Fernando Pessoa wrote that there was “nothing more sinister” than a man seeing his own face. “Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it,” he continued, observing that for centuries a person’s only reflection appeared incidentally, shimmering on the surfaces of rivers and ponds. Even then, the posture required was symbolic: to see yourself, you had to kneel and bend over. Self-recognition arrived only through a gesture of humility.

It’s taken millennia of technological advancement to defy this design. Obsidian mirrors existed as early as 6000 BC, but their reflections were dark and imprecise. Glass mirrors didn’t arrive until the first century, and even then they were rare and prohibitively expensive. In Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection, Mark Pendergrast notes that in the sixteenth century, a Venetian mirror set in an ornate silver frame was valued at £8,000 (£6.6 million in today’s currency) - nearly three times the price of a Raphael painting - meaning that for most of human history, seeing your own face clearly was more expensive than owning a masterpiece.

Before mirrors became widespread, identity was not something you scrutinised so much as something you inhabited. Prior to the fifteenth century, selfhood was largely collective, defined by things like your family, religion, trade, where you lived and societal duties. You understood yourself through function and belonging, not introspection. In those days great existential threats weren’t centred on whether you were living the most aligned, maxxed-out, self-actualised version of yourself. It was exile, because to be cut off from the group was to lose your identity entirely. Put simply: ‘you’ only existed through ‘we’.

When mirrors became easier to come by, people started spending real time with their own faces. You could look and keep looking, which changed things. You start to wonder who this person actually is. Best-selling historian Ian Mortimer argues in Millennium: From Religion to Revolution that mirrors fundamentally reshaped the idea of the self, giving birth to modern individualism. “The very act of a person seeing himself in a mirror,” he writes, “encouraged him to think of himself in a different way. He began to see himself as unique.” The cultural effects were immediate. Self portraiture surged in the fifteenth century and came to dominate nonreligious art, in part because painters could now paint themselves for the first time. First-person writing (previously an oddity) began to make sense, giving rise to autobiographical works like those of Margery Kempe, Leonora López de Córdoba and Lorenzo Ghiberti. Even astrology boomed during this period, as people looked for new ways to interpret themselves and their inner lives.

Once that door opened, it never really closed. Mirrors multiplied, then cameras, then screens, then feeds. We now carry devices in our pockets capable of holding thousands of images of us, taken by us and of us, across years and contexts. We enable them to track our faces, tag our friends, surface memories, Facetune our insecurities. They remind us of what we looked like last summer, five years ago, before and after. Worse still, they let us see how others validate it online. Through social media we learn which versions of ourselves are rewarded and which are ignored.

It’s funny how often psychologists end up back at the same place: the mirror. Again and again, modern theories of the self start with the moment you realise you can see yourself - and that other people can too. For Jacques Lacan, recognising your image in the “mirror stage” of development is what allows an “I” to form at all; but it’s also the moment that fractures you, splitting lived experience from its representation. Charles Horton Cooley reaches a similar conclusion from a sociological angle. We come to know ourselves, he argues, by imagining how we appear to others, then internalising that imagined gaze. By the mid-twentieth century, this doubled self takes on a more pragmatic cast. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman frames identity not as an inner essence revealed to the world, but as something produced in interaction: a series of performances that only hold together insofar as they are recognised by others.

None of these thinkers were writing in a world where the audience was this visible. Lacan wasn’t factoring in live comment sections. Cooley never had to consider view counts. Moreover, the pressure of being seen no longer depends on stepping into the spotlight yourself. You can watch someone else post or even go live, watch thousands of people watching them, scroll the comments, lurk on the lurkers, register what lands and what doesn’t. The audience isn’t imagined anymore; it’s right there, refreshing in real time.

In theory, the split was useful. A little distance from yourself makes self-awareness possible. But the balance has tipped. It feels as if the watcher now supervises, clipboard in hand, issuing verdicts on your every move and keeping score. Once that inner gaze starts to feel permanent, behaviour begins to orient itself around it.

Staring too long

As long as mirrors have existed, people have worried about what it does to the person looking into them - that something vital starts to spoil under too much self reflection. Narcissus wasted away on the river banks in Ancient Greece, so transfixed by his reflection that he refused to eat or drink. In medieval Europe, mirrors were said to conceal the devil, hovering just behind the glass. In seventeenth-century Russia, the Orthodox Church went further and banned them altogether, declaring mirrors sinful objects best kept out of the home.

It’s tempting to read these stories as straightforward warnings against narcissism, and on some level that reading works. There is something narcissistic about constantly narrating your own life. There’s also something narcissistic about obsessively scrutinising how other people narrate theirs. Calling someone “performative” often re-centres the self. It assumes their gesture is aimed at you, calibrated for your approval or your disgust. Why does it irritate us so much? Usually because, in some roundabout way, we recognise ourselves. The offence is a form of proximity.

There is also something nauseating about how much of our sense of self relies on being validated by other people. Not because being visibe is wrong (I’m a big advocate for putting yourself out there), but because it has the ability to alter the reason we desire things. Much of the moral policing around calling people “performative” comes from a fear that we’ve learned to want things not because we love them, but because they look good to others - and that without an audience, those wants might not even last. What gets lost isn’t sincerity so much as commitment. Wanting to be associated with something is very different from loving it enough to endure the boredom, failure and effort having it demands. The joy is in the latter, but it’s hard to reach when we keep skimming the surface.

The mistake, however, is treating “performative” as a character flaw instead of a condition. We are all, to some degree, performing. Not because we’re shallow or deceitful, but because we live in a world that constantly reminds us we are being watched. The mirror is no longer something you step in front of; it’s the environment itself. Like fish in water, we’re so immersed in this medium that we barely register its effects on us. Rather than this making us self-obsessed, it’s actually leaving us paralysingly self-conscious - keeping us at arm’s length from true experience. Too aware of ourselves to surrender to the effort and attention that being fully present requires, we hover just outside our own lives, watching instead of inhabiting them.

Narcissus, despite the linguistic bait-and-switch, isn’t really a story about vanity. The name Narcissus actually shares its root with the Greek narkē, which is where we get narcosis, aka, numbness. In ancient usage, it referred to the kind of paralysis induced by a drug or a shock, like the feeling of being frozen in place. Seen this way, Narcissus doesn’t die because he loves himself too much, but because he’s anaesthetised - a figure trapped in a closed loop of attention, endlessly bouncing between self and reflection until nothing new can get in.

Unfortunately, calling someone performative doesn’t break that spell. More often, it reveals how close we’re all still standing to the glass. The only real alternative isn’t moral purity or better self-awareness, but absorption: moments when attention moves outward, and when experience interrupts the internal commentary. Life keeps happening just beyond the reflection. It’s just easy to miss when you’re busy checking how it looks.

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How to stop watching yourself

1. Be suspicious of performative accusations, especially when you’re the one making them
   The impulse to label something as performative often signals over-identification. Before dismissing someone else’s gesture, ask what mirror it’s holding up for you.

2. Pay attention to what draws you in, not what provokes you
   Instead of interrogating someone’s intentions, pay attention to your response. Does what they’re saying or show stir real emotion inside you, or is it just triggering you? If it’s the latter, move on.

3. Interrupt the urge to narrate

   Pay attention to the moment when an experience starts to turn into a caption in your head. The internal voice that asks: How does this look? What does this say about me? That’s the watcher arriving. You don’t need to silence it, just delay it. Stay in the moment for a few seconds longer than you normally would.

But if you’re going to read just one thing this week, let it be this:

The cultural norms, narratives and power structures that define what’s acceptable.

My Year of Rest and Chinese-maxxing

I haven’t been on TikTok in 2026, but I remember thinking during my last scroll: Wow, everyone seems really into traditional Chinese medicine. Ear seeding, cupping, not drinking cold water, mugwort, tongue diagnostics - it all feels suddenly ubiquitous, a shift that Emily Sundberg also noted in her newsletter yesterday.

Part of the reason lies in something I explored in this piece about rhythmic health and traditional healing systems entering the mainstream:

“The increased demand [in ancient healing practices] is a direct response to burnout,” says Bradden. “Biohacking promised control, but it delivered exhaustion. Wellness tech told us to track everything, but tracking didn’t make us feel better, it just gave us more data to stress about.” After years of living against natural rhythms, whether through artificial light, constant stimulation or uninterrupted productivity, Bradden argues that many people are now “dysregulated at a cellular level”. Somatic and traditional practices, she says, resonate precisely because they restore what the modern world has stripped away.

But this also feels tied to a broader, slightly memeified fascination with being “more Chinese” right now, captured in phrases like “you met me at a very Chinese time in my life” or “you have to get more Chinese,” which have been circulating widely online. Minh Tran does a strong job of unpacking this fixation above, which I’d argue has its antecedents in the early panic around a potential TikTok ban, when users briefly migrated to Redbook, encountered Chinese users directly, and realised how much of their understanding of China had been shaped by adversarial, propaganda narratives. That moment cracked something open, but not very deeply. As Tran points out, the fascination stops well short of ideology or understanding. What emerges isn’t tankie politics so much as an aspirational Orientalism…less about China itself than about American decline…

‘Looksmaxxing’ Reveals the Depth of the Crisis Facing Young Men

The looksmaxxing subculture feels like a grotesque end-stage of our contemporary beauty culture. Spearheaded by Braden Peters, aka “Clavicular” - a nickname referring to the unusual importance looksmaxxers place on the width of their clavicles (aka collarbones) - “they trade stories of breaking their legs in order to gain extra inches, ‘bonesmashing’ their faces with hammers to heighten their cheekbones, injecting steroids and testosterone to inflate their muscles, and even smoking crystal meth to suppress their appetite.” Grim.

@kingclavicularThanks @ClavicularClips for edit

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The worst part is that for many of these men, beauty is no longer a means to anything else. “For many members of the group, though, looking good is not a path to social or romantic goals; it is an end in its own right, a kind of self-glorification,” writes Thomas Chatterton Williams. Their aspirational figure isn’t the charming womaniser but Achilles, aka, excellence defined by domination over other men. What’s missing is any shared purpose beyond hierarchy, which makes sense. In the absence of stable work, social authority or coherent ideals, masculinity collapses inward, competing wherever it can.

As economic insecurity deepens and the pathways that once promised mobility feel increasingly hollow, it’s not surprising that faith in institutions gives way to faith in the body. If nothing else can be reliably changed, at least the self can be optimised. Looksmaxxing may remain an extreme expression of this impulse, but the logic behind it (relentless self-improvement without any larger social payoff) already feels familiar, and increasingly hard to contain.

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What we wear and what it says about our values, identities and roles.

Menswear meets the moment

Lately, I’ve been struggling to share anything around my usual beat because it all feels so trivial against what’s happening in the world. It’s hard to talk about clothes or culture when ICE is shooting an unarmed nurse in the streets, taking five-year-olds with Spider-Man backpacks into custody or when Jared Kushner is casually announcing plans to build luxury resorts in Gaza. The dissonance is paralysing.

That’s why I found Mandy Lee’s video where she asked how you engage with fashion during moments of profound despair, hopelessness and grief so important. She argues that beauty, art and fashion can be small but necessary pockets of joy during times of despair. NOT as a retreat from activism, BUT as an act of resistance against the dehumanising effects of fascism. “Especially when I think about things that fascism wants to achieve, right? It is robbing and stripping anyone of their individuality with the way they think, the way they dress, the way they express themselves. I really do think that it’s a small, small act of rebellion against fascism to enjoy fashion and art and craftsmanship,” she says.

Cathy Horyn (my Queen) touches on something similar in her review of the menswear season above, noting how designers are responding - subtly or overtly - to “the chaos and cruelty in today’s world, a police-state culture.”

Still, in the grand scheme of things, finding it really hard to push through the perceived pointlessness of it all. More on that next week…

The logic of consumption, capitalism and commodified desire.

The battle for VICs

In my latest Vogue Business report, I looked at how very important clients are navigating the current wave of creative director changes. Bain estimates that VICs - just over 2% of customers - now account for 45% of global luxury spending, up from 35% in 2021. What happens when that 2% isn’t convinced?

I loved getting to speak directly with luxury training consultants and VICs themselves about the many, often wildly inventive ways brands persuade rich people to spend their money. From arranging private visits to Formula One paddocks to meet Lewis Hamilton, to flying clients to Cannes to walk the red carpet, the selling point is rarely the product alone.

The digital systems that shape how we interact, transact and behave.

How to start your job in fashion in the age of AI

I found this piece on starting a career in fashion in the age of AI particularly interesting for what it reveals about young people and entry-level roles. As with most technological shifts, the impact lands hardest at the bottom first. What schools and brands seem to agree on is that, as information becomes faster and easier to access, the real skill lies in knowing how to ask good questions, experiment with the tools, and critically evaluate what comes back. As one industry expert puts it:

“First and foremost, it’s about originality and cultural capital. Brands employ people for the knowledge that they bring,” says Thompson. “So yes, you can write something quickly, but what’s your awareness of what’s going on? What groups are you tapped into? What information can you bring? This understanding of your brand’s customer and the landscape of what’s happening at the moment is as important as an understanding of your team.”

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I’m in Thailand where I’m working on a story about whether Bangkok is the next big beauty capital (did you know there are over 6,600 aesthetic clinics – the second largest amount behind Korea?) and having fun and thinking lots.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a really generous interview I did with To Be Magazine and Lucy Jones, where we talked about what constitutes good cultural criticism, why everyone seems to be seeing a psychic lately, how looking down on what young people are doing ages you, my diplomat-to-journalist pipeline and an in/out for 2026.

LUCY JONES I discovered your writing via Substack, and I really like the way you frame trends through an academic but relatable lens. It feels like chatting to a friend about what’s going on in ‘the culture’. I wanted to start by asking what you’ve been thinking about or reading in the past week. What ideas are occupying your Notes app?

AMY FRANCOMBE So the piece I’m working on at the moment for Vogue Business is about psychics and how everyone seems to be seeing one. I love a little bit of manifestation and crystals and stuff like that but have never really gone into it. I had my first psychic reading this week, and it completely blew my mind. I went to somebody who had come recommended from loads of friends with the craziest stories, and it was just mental.

I feel like we are in an age of extreme self-quantification. We track our sleep, our cortisol levels, and our macros, and in many ways, we’re the healthiest we’ve ever been physically, but we just feel so terrible. I have really enjoyed researching about the spirit and why we’ve ignored it so much, and maybe why a lot of this—going to psychics, tarot readers, Etsy witches and even the TikTok tarot and stuff like that—is interesting is because so many of us are returning to spirit, which, with our obsession with optimisation, we’ve completely ignored.

LJ I’ve been thinking about that too and also reading a lot in that space. I actually just saw the other day that Margaret Atwood reads palms.

AF I love that. Honestly, it’s been quite transformative. This sounds so dramatic [laughs], and I say this about every story but I do feel like this is quite a life-changing discovery for me. I think it ties into so many of the things happening in the world right now, even with AI. I think AI is really cutting us off from our intuition and our creativity. We’re just outsourcing so much to tools. And so much of palm reading, or even psychics, is just intuition.

When I was speaking to the psychics, talking about the people that come to see them, they said their clients are 95 per cent women because women are told not to trust their bodies and their gut feelings. And a lot of the time when the psychic tells them something, they’re like, ‘I already knew that. I just needed it to be confirmed.’”

I think it’s really important to be spending more time in that deep meditative state, connecting with intuition and spirit and how you actually feel about things. Not just being as fast as possible and outsourcing it.

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LJ Yeah, definitely. We’re living in the era of the essay, or the Substack version of it, and with so much commentary on topics like girlhood or AI slop, it can feel like we hit a saturation point with particular ideas. I’m interested in hearing about how you navigate that. Are there any topics that you purposely avoid, and on the flip side, what makes an idea worth writing about?

AF I’ve seen a lot of this discourse about how we all need to shut up a little bit. We live in a culture. Things aren’t happening only to you; they are happening to multiple people. We all have experiences. And so much of culture is a dialogue between multiple people. If you connect with something, if you feel like you genuinely have something to say, it’s never a pile-on.

I’m quite intentional with what I write, and it’s because I’ve been doing it for so long in so many different areas of publishing. I’ve had to do the working in-house where it’s just about SEO and chasing traffic, and I know what it is to write when you’re just chasing that dragon. And I know what it is to write when you’re trying to figure out what you think about something. You’re trying to exorcise this demon within you. There are always different modes of writing.

Sometimes writing is quite an insular thing, and I just need to do it for myself. I want to go into the research holes, and I want to make a statement of self. I do think a lot of my writing is about educating myself and finding out things that I think are interesting, or I’m conflicted with, or have tension with. Then I realise it’s almost healing, thinking about why I behave in a certain way. Then I feel a change within myself.

I hope with my writing, when I share it, it’s taking someone on that journey too, and I assume they will also be feeling these things. Within my writing, I like to look at tension and ‘feelings’, for lack of a better word. I really like to unpick why I feel horrible [laughs]. What are the different forces? And what’s a better way to then live my life?

I do think self-help is the biggest category for a reason. And I would never think it, but recently people have—when they read my work and talk to me—spoken about my work in a way that it has that ‘self-help’ element and angle to it. At first I was really upset about that, but then I was like, It’s okay to make people feel better and more understanding of themselves and their influences in your writing.

LJ I think that’s a compliment! So this is kind of a big question, but what do you think the role of cultural criticism, or the cultural critic, is, and would you put yourself in that category?

AF I remember there was this article that The Cut wrote a few years ago that said that there are basically an infinite number of emotions. You just have to name them into existence. Then they went around the office and came up with 72 different emotions. They gave it a name, and it would be for really obscure things, like the feeling when you go to bed and you’ve had a really busy week, and you know that there’s nothing planned tomorrow, so you can sleep in as long as you want… I loved that.

I’m such a feeling person. I think that at our core we are feeling creatures, and so much of what we do and are driven by and think about is based in our feelings. When it comes to a cultural critic, if you apply that, it’s kind of sensing what the collective emotion that we’re all feeling is but we haven’t given a name yet. What is this new emotion? And that, to me, is the role of the cultural critic—to give a name to an emotion.

LJ That’s a really nice way of putting it. In your piece that’s titled after the Mark Fisher quote, ‘No one is bored, and everything is boring’, you write about a stasis of culture—a lack of newness or genuinely interesting ideas. Are you optimistic or pessimistic generally about where we are in ‘the culture’?

AF … Am I optimistic or pessimistic? I don’t know. I feel really conflicted because I think there’s always this element of, “The culture was better in my days.” I remember someone once said to me that the minute you start complaining that young people are doing something lame, you’re old. When I wrote that piece, I was trying to divorce myself from this idea of complaining that everything that is made by young people is lame. The issue is that mainstream culture has become so big and bloated. And so many subcultures, where really interesting things happen and really meaningful things grow and develop and have real weight, gravity and depth, suffocate because we are so swallowed and eaten by this monoculture.

When I think about whether I am optimistic, I think that every young person and all humans want to innovate. As much as that piece was quite damning, I did want to end it with, “This is how you reclaim that space.”

I do think that so many things that are getting more popular—whether it’s IRL culture or knowledge as a status symbol—are humans trying to push back. Culture always goes to one extreme and then it goes to another extreme. We’re constantly swinging between. We have definitely swung very heavily into what that piece was discussing, but it will swing back the other way.

LJ What would you be doing if you weren’t writing?

AF I had no intention of being a journalist. I used to run a family newspaper, but that wasn’t because I wanted to be a journalist. The first job I ever remember wanting to have is a spy because I’ve always been really interested in the information that the 0.001% of society knows. I think that’s why I’m such a good researcher now. I’m always looking for information. Basically, I just love information.

But I genuinely wanted to be a spy. MI5 would do these training programs that my teachers would send to me.

LJ Oh wow.

AF I’m a private person, but I’m not a secretive person. I like to talk and share things. So then I really wanted to be a diplomat. I went to university and studied politics, philosophy and economics. I even got onto the Civil Service fast track to become a diplomat. It’s a really competitive grad scheme, and I was fully going to be one. But then I went to this open day and thought, this does not align with me.

Throughout my second and third years of studying, I was interning at this city discovery app, purely because I could go to free dinners, free exhibitions and free concerts as long as I wrote about them. That was when I really started to get the remnants of reporting and speaking to people and interviewing people, and I absolutely loved it. I was not quite ready to let being a diplomat go, so I delayed it for a year.

But then, I kid you not, once I delayed it, the next day I was made redundant. I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I used to be someone that was very much like: this is my plan, this is what I’m doing, and I can’t just live in existential dread. But after that I was able to follow my intuition.

Journalism didn’t just happen overnight. I started emailing hundreds of people with ideas. You have to be talking to people, and you have to be talking to people you wouldn’t normally talk to and finding out what is going on in their world. So many of my stories come from dinner conversations next to someone that I’ve never met before.

I went to Paris Fashion Week, literally just to sneak into shows and go to parties because I had friends that were going and had a reason to be there. And there, I bumped into the person who was about to be the Digital Editor of The Face before it relaunched. I was telling her about myself. She was like, “We’re actually hiring. Come in for an interview.” Obviously, I did not have the experience to be a staff writer, but I interned for a couple of months. Absolutely loved it. They were like, “Would you want to be Staff Writer now?” And that’s how I fell into journalism and publishing. It was very organic.

LJ I think when you find that alignment of personal interests crossing over with career ambitions, it all just starts to make sense. One thing I’ve been thinking about while reading your essays is this idea of ‘brainmaxxing’. I feel like everyone’s very focused on addressing our brain rot and getting smarter. I’m constantly seeing things around this. I loved your ‘Knowledge as status is in [and clothes as status is out]’. I wanted to get into that a bit more. Because I do feel like there’s this sense that we all feel a little bit stupid or something. And as a self-proclaimed nerd it’s nice to see intelligence getting the spotlight, but then I wonder if it is just another form of self-improvement…

AF I have been thinking about this a lot, because obviously I put it on my ins and outs. Before I get into the ‘we’re feeling dumb’ thing, one thing I’ve been mulling over in my head is that we’re still scrolling a lot, right? And we’re talking about knowledge being status online. It’s not necessarily like everybody is now suddenly reading books. The form of content that does really well at the moment online is sharing knowledge. That’s for multiple reasons, but one of them definitely is the fact that we are so sick of lifestyle influencers.

If you think of the internet of a few years ago, it was really this thing of logos and flexing, especially the hypebeast era. And that’s how you’d grow a following. We’ve obviously had such a pushback towards that. People are really angry. There’s so much discourse about gatekeeping, so people don’t want to share their favourite clothing pieces because then it becomes a trend, and then you’re a meme. On the other hand, people are so sick of influencers making all this money selling us clothes. Influencers that are doing well are knowledge influencers. If you can’t make content about aspirational things, you have to share knowledge.

I fucking feel stupid too. I know that my brain capacity is not where it used to be. And there’s a reason why ‘slop’ was word of the year. We’re really atrophying our brains, and our synapses are fraying. I can feel it. Even as somebody who is reading a lot and trying to write, I still fucking scroll, babe. It’s got me. My screen time is way too high. I’m trying to work on it. I can feel my brain is not at the capacity it used to be. It’s really scary. We’re starting to have more content about what this effect will be on our brains. We all want to regulate this.

I did a piece on my Substack about the ‘enshittification of thinking’. And I do think that that’s happening. What I was saying about this idea of a pendulum swinging between two things—we’re going to have to swing back.

Francombe’s ‘in/out’ for to Be:

OUT: ultra-slick tech minimalism aesthetics.

IN: design that shows a human touch.

We’re moving away from the super-polished, Apple-era look and towards work that makes the human behind the design visible. This will show up in childlike drawings, annotations, blueprints, how-to manual graphics, etcetera. Instead of hiding the process, it will put it on display, using visible workings as a way to prove it was made by someone who knows what they’re doing (not just someone who prompted well).

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There were also so many great career-advice questions that came up. I don’t want to rush through those or squeeze them in here, so maybe we turn this into a running series and save them for another day. I’m thinking the next one could be more about the state of journalism and how to make it work in the current climate. Open to suggestions though.

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Start by researching the publications you want to write for. Pay close attention to the style of their headlines. If your pitch could read like a headline you’d actually see on their site, the editor is much more likely to open the email. Go beyond the headline too: get familiar with the types of stories they publish. Are they first-person essays? Reported features with multiple voices? Listicles? Opinion pieces? Every publication has a distinct tone of voice and editorial approach, so you need to tailor your pitch to match.

Next, research the right editor to contact. The masthead of the physical magazine is often the most up-to-date source for this. But LinkedIn is also good. To find their email just google “[Insert publication name] email format” and update with name accordingly. Look out for commissioning editors or the editor in charge of the section you’re targeting.

Your pitch doesn’t need to be long. What matters is clarity and relevance. A strong pitch usually includes:

• A clear, engaging headline that mirrors the publication’s style. In editorial meetings, it’s pretty normal for a pitch to get a yes just off the headline (before anyone’s read the rest of it) so don’t rush this part. Also, make it your subject line.

• A central question your piece will answer. If it’s a compelling question, the editor will want to know the answer to it so are more likely to commission.

• A timely news hook, something that signals this is part of the current conversation. This could be a viral TikTok, a new statistic, something a celebrity recently said, a new movie release with an interesting thematic tension or a broader cultural shift that’s gaining traction.

• If it’s a reported piece, name a few potential sources or voices you’ll include.

• A little bit about you and a couple links to your previous work.

• How many words you can write and when.

I really can’t stress this enough: most of the pitches I receive are far too long. These days, I usually send a single paragraph. When a pitch starts winding through every possible thing you might say, it actually makes it harder to understand what the piece is about. A lot of the time, I’m left unsure what the main argument even is. There are a million angles you could take on any one topic, but this is a 1,000–1,200 word article. It needs to be tight and focused, not a dissertation. Really, you’re just outlining the bare bones of where the article could go. Asking interesting questions is more important than having the answers here!!!

Finally, a note on rejection: commissioning budgets are being slashed left, right and centre across media, so don’t take it personally if you don’t hear back or get a no. It’s completely normal to send ten pitches before one lands, persistence is key. A great resource for knowing which editors are actively seeking pitches is the Freelance Writing Jobs newsletter by Sian Meades-Williams. Opinion desks at The Guardian, The Independent and Metro are also typically open to pitches, btw. Try at the weekend since less people are pitching then (you will have to turnaround same day though).

I’ve included two really old pitches that ended up being commissioned as a reference. I chose them because I didn’t know the commissioning editor at the time and sent both as cold emails. Haven’t included my about me section since these are 4 years old, lol.

Fun fact: the Dazed pitch was the first one I had commissioned after I went freelance, which is probably why it’s so long. The i-D pitch shows me starting to realise that shorter really is sweeter.

PITCH: The women psychonauts healing magic mushroom’s macho bent (Dazed)

Mushroom mania has worked its way deep into the public (sub)consciousness, with the chaotic coronavirus fever dream turning Brits to the healing properties of magic fungi. Interestingly, the results of the 2020 Global Drug Survey found that it’s women who are more likely to use them to treat psychiatric conditions and emotional distress, with 9.2% of women claiming to have used psychedelics in an attempt to treat trauma, compared to just 3.4% of men, in the last 12 months.

However, there is a serious underrepresentation of women in both the research surrounding psilocybin-assisted therapy and in popular trip culture. A 2020 report found that across seven psychedelic conferences, 68% of the researchers were men and over 90% were white, while culture scholar Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo has heavily discussed the dearth of analysis and representations of female psychonauts in popular culture.

This article will explore why women have been traditionally left out of shroom literature, the impacts of this exclusion and the grassroots organisations that are reasserting women in the psychedelic space. I will also embed first hand thoughts and experiences of 18-24 women who have been self-medicating with shrooms, and a look at figures such as SZA who are normalising mainstream representation of women and shrooms.

A list of people I would reach out to:

• Zoe Helene, founder of Cosmic Sisters

• Catherine Bird, Research Assistant, Psychedelic Trials Group KCL

• Buki Fadipe, founder of Adventures in OM

• Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, culture scholar

• X3 18-25-year-old women who have self-medicated with psychedelics in the last few months

I think this article would be a great fit for Dazed as it is complementary to your articles “Does doing psychedelics make you more accepting of a world in crisis?” and “Why one in five young people have microdosed through lockdown” which gave a preliminary look at the mushroom renaissance and its connection to aiding mental health. But, more importantly, starts a conversation that urgently needs to be had – especially in light of the traumatic news cycle surrounding violence towards women, as well as the reports on Covid-19 disproportionately impacting women both economically and mentally.

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PITCH: The unstoppable rise of the meta selfie (i-D)

Social media it-girls Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid and Addison Rae have all taken one, while hoards of micro-influencers swear by them. The “meta selfie” is the latest cyber Y2K-inspired trend to take over Instagram, and they’re not only breaking the internet – they’re breaking the fourth wall.

The meta-selfie is a selfie that shows the act of taking a photo. It can manifest in a variety of ways, for example: a mirror selfie with the front camera interface showing or taking a photo of someone else capturing the shot.

But isn’t this just a rehash of John Berger’s observation that: “women watch themselves being watched”? Or is it more like Petra Collins’ style of photography which reclaims the female gaze? Or, perhaps it’s the final frontier of pushing back against the glossy, influencer aesthetic for an equally contrived lo-fi aesthetic?

I’d love to explore these questions for i-D, speaking to social media experts Digi Fairy as well as a selection of Gen-Z women who have posted meta selfies.

Read here

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This is kind of a million-dollar question, and one I still ask myself all the time. I don’t think you ever really stop wondering about this, but I’ve been asking it long enough to have picked up a few helpful pointers.

When it comes to writing about trends, I don’t see them as aesthetics but as solutions people are testing out in public. Whenever you notice something popping up, the most important question to ask is why. What else is going on culturally? What anxieties/ desires is this responding to? And how does it connect to other things happening at the same time?

For me, bringing ideas together is the heart of good cultural writing. But to do that, you can’t just be scrolling Instagram or TikTok. Those platforms can be one part of the puzzle, sure, but they can’t be the whole thing. As I touched on in my “Fundamentals are the building blocks of fun” piece, you have to be reading way beyond that. Ideally backwards. A lot of what feels “new” culturally has very obvious antecedents if you zoom out far enough. Classic media studies and cultural theory can be incredibly useful here because they help you actually make sense of what you’re seeing online, rather than just regurgitating someone else’s take in slightly different words. Don’t stop there, either. Read designer show notes, watch movies, pay attention to what exhibitions and art shows are coming up. Look at what artists, filmmakers, comedians, painters, writers, podcasters, product launches, etc, are responding to, and what tensions they’re trying to work through in their work. Not only can that give you a timely hook, it often provides a much deeper, more researched, more lived-in grounding than anything you’ll get from a scroll.

We also massively underestimate the importance of IRL conversations. Someone asked me recently how I balance being a journalist with spending less time on social media without feeling like I’m missing trends. Honestly, most of my ideas come from being away from social media. If people are genuinely talking about something in real life that’s a good sign it’s not just a flat, two-dimensional “internet trend” but something that’s actually affecting how people live and think. Plus, if missing one evening online means you’ve completely missed the boat, that’s a pretty strong indication it wasn’t worth writing about in the first place.

A lot of people also asked a more specific version of this question: how do you know if something is worth writing about if it feels like it’s already been said? That concern is completely valid. When so much of our thinking happens out loud online, it can feel like every angle has already been debated to death.

The key thing I want to say here is this: we don’t think in a vacuum. We exist within culture. If something is sitting in the collective unconscious, lots of people are going to arrive at similar conclusions at roughly the same time, often totally independently. And because we now have platforms to instantly publish those thoughts, it can feel like everyone is saying the same thing all at once.

That doesn’t automatically mean the idea is tired or pointless. It usually just means it’s resonant. It’s actually very rare to come up with an idea that absolutely no one has ever spoken about before. And when you do, there’s a decent chance it’s so specific or personal that it might only matter to you. That can still be valuable but it might not always translate to a publication that’s thinking about traffic.

So instead of obsessing over originality in the purest sense, it’s more useful to think about perspective and timing. A few other things worth considering:

• Do you have a personal connection to the topic that gives it a genuinely interesting angle?

• Has the publication already written about it? Have their competitors? If the answer to both is yes, it’s probably too late (unless you have a very clear new way in).

• It’s not plagiarism if you credit properly!!!! If someone has already articulated something similar online, you don’t need to pretend you didn’t see it. You can reach out and interview them as part of the piece. Or you can quote them directly and embed the TikTok, tweet or Instagram post where they said it. Then build upon it with your own reflections and analysis.

Very few pieces arrive fully formed out of nowhere. Most of them grow out of listening closely, crediting generously and then pushing the idea one step further.

Good luck!!!! Send me your articles once they get published <3

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Seeing used to mean believing. Now it means doubting whatever appears in front of you online. Every image is guilty until proven human. Has a bunny ever, in the recorded history of mammals, jumped on a trampoline? Is the Pope allowed to swag out in a Moncler puffer jacket? Does Hailey Bieber secretly have a hot brother?

This year we tumbled headfirst into the slop-hole, a bottomless pit of mass-produced, low-effort algorithmic waste. Pumped out by generative tools like Midjourney and Sora, slop has seeped into every crushed corner of the internet, spawning thousands of images that arrive pre-stale: mushy, unformed, and shoveled into a digital trough for creatures without the privilege (or burden) of choosing their meals. Nearly one in ten of the fastest-growing YouTube channels now posts AI content exclusively. On TikTok, AI-generated clips routinely outperform human-made ones, proof that the algorithm can’t tell the difference and increasingly, neither can we. So of course the Macquarie Dictionary crowned “AI slop” its word of the year, the institutional way of admitting we spent 2025 consuming aesthetic mush by the ladle.

The attraction of slop is that it’s the path of least psychological resistance. I know because I’m just as tangled as everyone else. I scroll slack-jawed, like a baby bird waiting for something pre-chewed to drop in. When the algorithm pushes a bowl toward me, I motorboat my face in it, grateful for the brief suspension of thought. In a world tilting under climate disasters, political chaos, and whatever fresh crisis the timeline serves before lunch, there’s something soothing about content that asks nothing of you, expects nothing from you, and reveals nothing about you either. Please, algorithm, won’t you serve me some more Chubby the Cat?

@chubbycat_1From Tears to Vengeance 🕯️🔥. #kitten #catsoftiktok #catstory #cats #meow

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But underneath that private pleasure sits a very public panic. Each week, a new piece of viral slop sends the internet into a collective trust fall with no arms waiting at the bottom. The line between what was shaped by a human hand and what was excreted by a machine grows thinner by the day; we squint harder, understand less, and still can’t stop watching, which is maybe the part that scares us most.

What I can’t get over, though, is why machine-made imagery gives us hives when so much human-made stuff already looks just as uncanny. Slop blends in because it resembles the culture we’d already built for ourselves. Long before AI entered the chat, years of dopamine flatlining and compulsive self-curation had worn down the boundary between the real and the rendered. Labubu matcha Dubai chocolate, Lost Mary vapes, Skibidi Toilet, look-alike doppelgänger competitions: we’ve already normalized a culture that looks overtly synthetic. We lacquered our nerve endings in sugar, overriding their thresholds with a constant feed of hyper-saturated aesthetics until the surreal felt more familiar than the mundane. Along the way, we taught ourselves to crave that sensation, to chase the next pixelated jolt like addicted lab rats pressing the pleasure lever again and again.

Cultural critics have been diagnosing this drift for decades, tracing each new medium by the residue it leaves on our nervous systems. Every wave of mass entertainment arrives with the same accusation: pleasure delivered too fast, too easily, in doses that bypass thought and go straight for the bloodstream. Take David Foster Wallace, who argued that television wasn’t evil so much as “irresistible” because it offered “unearned, instant reward” and became dangerous precisely because it was “too good at providing what we wish for.” TV anticipated our desires before we could articulate them, spoon-feeding us pre-digested feelings until we became, in his words, “blank-eyed” spectators of our own attention. Decades earlier, Neil Postman had already warned that the real cultural threat wouldn’t be authoritarian control but entertainment so seamless that it would erode our appetite for depth. He imagined a society lulled not by fear but by pleasure, distracted into submission by a constant drip of stimulation.

@moteaeats#labubu #matcha #crumbl #mukbang #fyp #foryoupage #dubaichocolate

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These anxieties resurface every time a new medium appears. The printing press would rot the mind; novels would corrupt women; radio would radicalize children; television would liquefy attention; MTV would destroy literacy; video games would erode empathy; TikTok would reduce memory to a goldfish flicker. AI slop, though, feels like the final boss of that fear. It arrives at a velocity neither Wallace nor Postman could have imagined, hurling content at us faster than we can form the thought that we might want it. Their warnings, that mass media would dull our desire for depth and that frictionless entertainment would make us passive, now read like early symptoms of a cancer we only recognized after we were already deep into stage four.

Still, who can blame us for watching slop? Why wouldn’t we choose the warm, gelatinous tide over the cold clarities of complexity? The kinds of attention that actually stretch you feel impossible when most of us barely have the energy to reply to texts, let alone wrestle meaning from difficult art.

Here’s the thing: the forms of attention that make the world feel richer are almost always the ones we’ve written off as dry as hell. Take physics, a discipline full of invisible particles, imaginary numbers, and quantum realms no one can visualize. Not exactly a seductive pitch next to a feed engineered for brain-rot bliss. But as Carlo Rovelli writes in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, “the beauty of the world is revealed to those who seek to understand it.” We must think the sky is boring, considering how often our necks are cranked down at our phones. But would you be so dismissive if you knew its blue comes from sunlight scattering off tiny air molecules? Or that sunsets turn red because the light has traveled so far through the atmosphere that only the longest wavelengths survive the journey?

The same goes for classical music. It’s not exactly something you’d pair with a split-screen of Subway Surfers and slime ASMR. And yet, when someone like Rosalía channels years of operatic training, classical discipline, and learning thirteen different languages into an album, doesn’t it sound so fucking good? Understanding animates the world. Slop flattens it, rewarding rapid consumption rather than gradual understanding. In a culture that worships ease, of course slop became the logical endpoint of desire. Attention is a muscle, and slop is the couch it’s sunk into.

If 2025 is the year of slop, then maybe 2026 can be the year we pick up a fork again and actually chew

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OUT: “I could have made that”

IN: High culture (i.e Rosalia’s LUX)

For decades, postmodernism took a sledgehammer to the old hierarchy of skill. From Duchamp’s urinal to Warhol’s soup cans, much of this work triggered the same reflexive response: “I could have made that”. The movement deliberately shifted value away from craft and toward concept. The artist became a theorist; the audience became the interpreter.

AI changes the stakes entirely. When machines can churn out “good enough” content on demand, conceptual cleverness stops feeling impressive. Instead to stand out today, you have to make something so technically and intuitively sophisticated that it escapes the reach of prompts. It requires a depth of craft the average person wouldn’t even know hot to instruct an AI to emulate. You can see this in Rosalía’s LUX (thirteen languages, a live orchestra, an almost obsessive commitment to doing things the hard way) which has earned her both critical and popular acclaim.

OUT: TikTok microtrends

IN: “Gift guide for the niche luxury chic girl”

Evil doesn’t die, it just reinvents itself. It’s cringe to want to be a tomato girl and we can all see through anything affixed with -core. But hyper-specific gift guides curated around a vibe and packed with ready-made affiliate links? Inject it directly into my veins.

Me personally I’ve always been into either:

1. Something funny. Extra points if it references an inside joke.

2. An experience. I’d rather make a memory together than end up with another bedazzled personalised claw clip or Aesop hand cream I absolutely do not need.

Maybe it’s just me but the best gifts are the ones where you can tell the person actually thought about you. Sure, we all have an office Secret Santa or a random cousin we need to tick off the list, but the real magic of a gift is feeling seen. Ps, if you’re feeling gift guide fatigue you should read this article “Are gift guides going out of style?”

OUT: How to find your personal style

IN: How to style one item multiple ways

Last year, FashionTok was completely overrun with “How to find your personal style” videos. Like anything that gets repeated enough times, it eventually hits saturation and loses all meaning. Now the new format taking over is people styling one piece in a dozen different ways, which fits neatly into the whole frugal chic movement.

Honestly, I don’t find this wave nearly as irritating as the personal style moment. A lot of it is actually useful, and the underlying message (buy less, wear things more, stop treating clothes as your entire identity) feels like an improvement.

I really like this creator in particular:

@rachaelgrifI love to watch clothing videos, but bring back DEPTH…I saw a lovely video a few nights ago of someone going through their bangle collection, and it was so refreshing😭😭Are people really loving these try on haul because they like the creator/their outfits, or because they are constantly chasing the rush from buying something new?…🤨On another note…wtf is the story with all the H&M ads?🤨They must have soooo much money to have A list models in their campaigns, and to send money to thousands of influencers right? Yet provide no information about their supply chain or fair wages for their workers…#getagrip The only thing they are good at is greenwashing💚 anyway…thank u soooo much for 15k wtf i never expected this! Ily #sustainablefashion#secondhandfashion#hm

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OUT: Bodies as mannequins

IN: Bodies as subjects (clothing designed around lived movement)

With the announcement of the 2026 Met Gala theme, “Costume Art”, an exhibition centred on the dressed body and the way garments function as both sculpture and lived experience, we’re about to see fashion re-orient itself toward the physical form in a much more explicit way. The timing couldn’t be more perfect, landing at the same moment we’re having a crescendo of discourse around designers “not making clothes for real women” this past fashion season. Across runways, we saw extreme silhouettes, unwearable proportions and pieces that seem to treat the body as an afterthought or a conceptual inconvenience. Against that backdrop, the Met’s theme feels almost corrective.

You could even argue that one of the earliest signals of this shift was the Vibram FiveFingers shoe, which centred the natural biomechanics of the foot rather than forcing it into a traditional silhouette. My prediction? We’re going to see a lot more of these body-first innovations proliferate. And I have a Vogue Business article coming out on December 1st that explores a very interesting way that this will manifest throughout 2026. Watch this space.

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Last Friday I finally caved in and took the day off to watch my favourite comfort films. By the time I put Uptown Girls on I was deep into my rot, but when Dakota Fanning’s character, Ray, proclaimed that: “Fundamentals are the building blocks of fun” (a quote originally by ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov), it somehow cut through the brain fog.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in relation to good thinking and good writing. In a recent AMA, a few people asked for writing advice (I promise I’ll get into the specifics next week), but for now here’s the only thing that actually matters: expand your media diet. Read the writers who inspired the writers you love now. Follow the lineage backwards. Everyone always says that reading makes you a better writer, which is true, but more importantly it makes you a better thinker.

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Part of the reason the never-ending online discourse is so insufferable is that we’re all just reacting to each other in real time, like a giant communal flinch. We’re responding to responses to responses, and by the tenth reply-chain we’ve completely forgotten what the original thought even was. Identity, desire, technology, politics, spectacle, gender, power, the body, the internet, the self - the things we scream about online as if they were born yesterday - have been dissected, flayed open, theorised, critiqued, mourned and reimagined by writers who were paying attention long before we even had usernames. The greats have already mapped so much of this terrain, and this is why reading them matters. They give you the fundamentals that make the whole circus legible. Once you have those foundations, you stop reacting to whatever someone posted five minutes ago and start noticing how we got here, which parts are genuinely new, which parts are just old patterns dressed in new costumes and which differences actually matter. And then - then - your job becomes interpreting the new strangenesses of now with the inheritance of the thinkers who came before you.

Here’s where I’d recommend you start…

Toni Morrison - “The Site of Memory” (1987)

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In “The Site of Memory”, Toni Morrison confronts the profound silences in the historical record, especially around the lives and interior worlds of Black people. She argues that writers must look beyond what was documented and turn toward the deeper truths that were deliberately omitted or unable to be expressed. For Morrison, memory becomes a repository of emotion, experience and humanity that official history often refuses to hold. An immensely important view when thinking about how today’s algorithms erase or distort what doesn’t fit neatly into their profit logic or political agenda.

Donna Haraway - “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)

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Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto is one of those essays that makes you feel like your brain just got plugged into a power outlet in a good way. She hands you the cyborg as a metaphor for life in a world where boundaries between human, machine, gender, technology, identity are blending into this messy but liberating hybrid space. Would love to read someone incorporating these ideas into the age of deep fakes and artificial intelligence…

Susan Sontag - “The double standard of aging” (1972)

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Reading this feels like walking through a hall of mirrors where only women’s reflections have been distorted. Sontag lays out how aging becomes a spectacle when it’s happening to women, while men float into later life wrapped in automatic prestige. RIP Susan Sontag you would have hated Facetune and skincare for children.

Mark Fisher - “Existing the Vampire Castle” (2013)

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Fisher takes on guilt politics, online moralism and the suffocating dynamics of call-out culture (bare in mind Instagram was only three years old at the time). Read it to see what I mean about learning the fundamentals.

Sherry Turkle - Always-on, Always-on-you: The tethered self (2008)

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Turkle examines what happens when the phone stops being an object and becomes a condition. The essay maps the shift from “using technology” to living inside a constant digital tether. I want to read someone expand upon these in the era of smart glasses, which seem committed to keeping our eyes even more locked onto screens.

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Earlier this year, at a brand dinner, I found myself seated next to a man midway through 75 Hard. Between bites of salad, he preached the gospel of dopamine detoxes and 5 a.m. wake-ups. Then, mid-sentence - somewhere between cold plunges and Andrew Huberman - he told me he hadn’t ejaculated in over three months. To clarify: he has had sex with his girlfriend. He just doesn’t let himself finish. He was the second man to tell me this year.

Apparently, the idea came from Think and Grow Rich. Published in 1937, the self-help relic claims to reverse-engineer greatness through sixteen laws of success drawn from the habits of history’s so-called Great Men. The tenth, The Mystery of Sex Transmutation, insists that sexual energy is one of the most powerful forces in existence, and that a man who can channel it into ambition will be unstoppable. According to author Napoleon Hill, Abraham Lincoln was particularly skilled at this.

Now, I doubt President Lincoln was observing No Nut November, but it is very telling of our time that the NoFap community has rebranded the book as a manifesto for withholding. Men like my dinner companion have become high priests of abstinence-as-advancement, alchemising libido into productivity, hunger into hustle and semen into synergy. It’s all very Silicon Valley Tantra.

In fairness, though, everyone seems to be doing some version of this. We’re living in an era of extreme want - to be hotter, more locked in, more aura-maxxed - while simultaneously in an age of extreme deprivation. Celery juice at sunrise. GLP-1 at lunch. "Low dopamine mornings and high-protein evenings. It’s not asceticism; the goal isn’t enlightenment. It’s just a way to raise our market value.

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Most of our improvement trends can be boiled down to this: everyone wants to be wanted, but no one wants to actually want. If desirability is a currency, then to desire is a liability. Nearly everything feels calibrated toward being chosen, though for what exactly, I’m not sure anymore. A follow on Instagram? A date with a better swag ratio than your ex? Life has begun to feel like an endless casting call for desirability, except no one knows who’s behind the camera or what role we’re even auditioning for.

This new strain of self-alienation has bloomed against a pornified backdrop, where exhibitionism masquerades as empowerment and is rewarded as long as the body in question fits neatly within the algorithm’s margins. Sabrina Carpenter is the current patron saint of sex even though she looks like a Barbie doll with no private parts. Everything is suggestive, but nothing actually suggests anything that looks pleasurable.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since Marina Abramović announced her new show, Balkan Erotic Epic, a four-hour ritual of thirteen scenes and seventy performers, rooted in Balkan folklore and ancestral rites. Abramović said she’s “determined to show the erotic as a portal into cycles of life, not as commercially sexual,” which feels like exactly what we’re missing.

As a culture, we no longer understand the erotic. We’ve stripped it for parts, degraded it into porn, profanity and performance until even saying the word feels faintly indecent. But to feel erotic, in its oldest sense, is to be overtaken by life: that blinding heat that rises when you’re so present you almost dissolve. It’s the pulse that makes art possible, conversation magnetic. Call it flow state. Call it Eros.

The problem is, we’ve built a culture designed to resist that kind of surrender. We’re too busy managing ourselves to be moved by anything, deferring gratification to some future, more optimised self who is probably too emotionally regulated to feel much at all.

Our bodies are not objects to be monitored, but living vessels through which we experience and connect with the world. But most of our encounters now happen through screens, so I guess it’s easy to see how we’ve rationalised Eros to death, until the thing that was meant to make us feel alive mostly just makes us feel… efficient. The great irony, of course, is that by cutting ourselves off from it, we condemn ourselves to mediocrity. Worse, this fragmentation of self leaves us increasingly susceptible to exploitation by systems and people indifferent to our actual interests. Disembodiment breeds compliance; when we abandon our own desires, it becomes easy for others to script them for us.

Eros in the age of optimisation

The word erotic has been domesticated over time, narrowed to mean something you’d probably search for in private. But it comes from Eros, one of the oldest Greek gods, who, before he was Cupid with his bow, was born from Chaos itself. In the earliest stories, Eros wasn’t about romance or lust the way we think of it now. Instead he was the universe’s first stirring, the pulse that pulled order out of disorder and made matter come together. Less a feeling than a force, the will that draws atoms into pattern and makes something out of nothing.

Throughout history, thinkers from Freud to Audre Lorde have understood Eros as a kind of internal voltage. For Freud, Eros was the life instinct, the drive that pulls us toward connection and creation. For Lorde, it’s what wakes us up from numbness. “For once we begin to feel deeply all aspects of our lives,” she wrote in her seminal Uses of the Erotic essay, “we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”

In both myth and theory, Eros is the same force: the spark that brings aliveness out of inertia. To live erotically is to stay attuned to that rhythm, to let the energy that animates the world also animate you. But that kind of vitality resists management, which is precisely why the modern world fears it.

Our long slide away from Eros has been happening for centuries. Georges Bataille thought it was the inevitable price of civilisation. Animals, he wrote in his 1957 book Eroticism, live in continuity with the world, never standing apart from what they are in. They eat, sleep, mate, die without rupture between being and doing. Humans, by contrast, live in discontinuity. In creating tools, we created subjects and objects, and the self was born somewhere in that divide: the one who acts and the thing acted upon. Progress gave us stability but it also peeled us away from the world. “We are discontinuous beings,” Bataille wrote, “individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear”. Our individuality - the thing we fetishise - is also our torment. We crave the feeling of being waves among other waves, even as we build systems to prevent exactly that.

There are only two ways back to that continuity: death and the erotic, which, as the French remind us by calling orgasm la petite mort (the small death), are more alike than we’d like to think. Read alongside Freud, eroticism becomes a model for living: what Bataille called “assenting to life up to the point of death.” Sex is one route, death is another, but so is losing yourself in dance, devotion, art, awe, good conversation - anything that momentarily dissolves the boundary between you and the world.

However, if Bataille’s tragedy was that civilisation severed us from continuity, ours is that we have built machines to institutionalise the severance. We no longer stand apart from the world; we scroll through it. The subject and the object have been supplanted by the user and the interface, and what was once an encounter has become an evaluation measured in metrics. This system teaches us not how to meet others fully, but to hover at a safe distance, treating every interaction like a mental tabulation. Am I hotter? Funnier? More stable? Should I be drinking chlorophyll water too?

It’s easy to mistake this hyper-self-awareness for self-knowledge. But the more we monitor ourselves, the less we seem to truly know ourselves. The erotic is where you’re absorbed into people, places, meals, music, art, museums. Not assessing them from afar for how they’ll play in your performance of self online.

And yet, I get it. The world’s a mess, and control feels like the last safe drug. It’s easier to tweak your skin-care routine than to face the possibility that no amount of retinol will fix the deeper rot. But control is a fragile high. It wears off the second something unpredictable happens.

Eros doesn’t work like that. Like the force that made it, it can feel a bit like chaos — the ecstatic undoing of the self, not the obsession with shaping it. It asks you to loosen your grip, to risk being moved - not just emotionally, but deeper into unguarded parts of yourself you’ve learned to shut off. And that’s terrifying, because control promises safety, even if it never delivers. In an age that rewards optimisation, Eros acts as an insurgency. It’s what happens when you stop tracking your steps and start noticing where you are actually walking to.

Audre Lorde called the erotic “an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognising its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” That’s my favourite way to think about eroticism: as self-possession in the most literal sense. To feel yourself deeply is to become harder to manipulate. You can’t sell much to someone who already feels whole, which is why we’re taught to stay slightly hungry all the time, whether it be for love, for validation or for a version of ourselves that can be improved just a bit more.

How to cultivate more Eros

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1. Courting slowness.

Speed is the enemy of depth. We move through life like we’re late for something no one ever told us the start time of. “How are you?” “So busy.” God, that phrase makes me want to walk into traffic.

This constant rush also messes with our sense of time. Time isn’t fixed; it’s elastic. It stretches or snaps depending on how much of you is actually present. Thirty minutes on a treadmill feels like an eternity; thirty minutes on your phone vanishes before you even notice. In one, you’re in your body; in the other, you’re kind of suspended, scrolling the surface of life instead of being in it. That difference, that gap between time spent and time felt is Eros’ whole playground.

Psychedelics make this obvious. Anyone who’s taken shrooms knows that time stops behaving like time. How it stretches out, how it gives itself back to you when the warm fuzz and fluid colours kick in. Slowness has become a cursed word, but if you’re living properly, everything should unfold in that deep-time zone where things ooze and stretch instead of blur. The alternative is that familiar hunch over the laptop, stomach knotted, racing to tick off as many to-dos as possible before you remember that most of them don’t actually matter.

2. Protecting your attention.

The erotic withers under surveillance, especially self-surveillance. Create unmonitored space. Mystery is oxygen for desire.

3. Embracing sincerity.

Eros hates irony. You can’t indulge with the world if you’re too busy pretending you don’t care. We’ve built a whole culture around deflection but erotic aliveness requires exposure.

4. Living below the neck.

We’ve become a species of floating heads - all brain, no body. Most of us live like we’re piloting a machine from the control room rather than actually in it. But the erotic lives in the flesh. You don’t have to do yoga or breath work or whatever’s trending this week; you just have to remember you have a body.

“Why Can’t Fashion See What It Does to Women?” — The New York Times

“What is the purpose of women’s fashion? Is it to create tools of actualisation? To profit from insecurity? To carve out in cloth a new place in the world?”

Asks Vanessa Friedman, before she notes the season’s …

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